Charlie en Granada

Trying to Kick the Habit of Saying “Sí” Instead of “Oui”: Paris and Lille

2008-01-15T14:33:00.000+01:00

My five-month European journey ends here in Paris. I expected to have just a day or two here, but because of the train fiasco in Lyon I suddenly found myself with five nights and four days in Paris. Of all the cities in the world in which to suddenly find yourself with several extra days, Paris is one of the best.

I mostly spent my time wandering the city by foot rather than taking the metro (which costs 1.50 euro per trip) to save money and to see more of the city. In fact, I walked so much in Paris (ten to fifteen miles per day) that by day three my feet hurt and I noticed while climbing Montemarte that I was starting to get shin splints.

I took two free tours by the tour organization New Europe. If you have not heard of it, Google it; I highly recommend it. The tour guides make money by tips only, which forces them to be fun, interesting and energetic tour guides. I did the New Berlin tour two years ago, and since then they have expanded to several other cities, including Paris.

The first tour was a 3.5-hour walking tour of the city, covering the 2,500 years of history in Paris, all the way from the Celtic “Parisii” tribe that settled on the island in the Seine River, through dozens of wars and revolutions until today. My guide, a Bostonian studying theatre and mime in Paris, pointed out some amazing things about where we were standing: this is where Knights of the Templar were burned alive, for example, and this is where Marie Antoinette was beheaded, this is where the Nazis flew their flag, on and on.

The second tour, which starts at 6 p.m. (18:00 for any European readers) at the Moulin Rouge, located in the heart of Paris’ red light district, is a two-hour walk through Montemarte, the former Bohemian quarter located on a hill where famous artists lived. We learned about the Prussian occupation, how they sieged the city from the hill and destroyed all of its windmills (except one; they killed its stubborn defender, cut his body in four pieces and spun them around on the four tips of his windmill, the only one still standing today). Montemarte is where Van Gogh, Picasso and scores of other famous artists lived, painted, drank Absinthe and formed new artistic movements. We passed Van Gogh’s former house, which presumably still contains the blue bedroom that he painted, along with Picasso’s favorite restaurant, house and studio. On a few occasions, the guide pointed out streets that Van Gogh famously painted (the painting of the street lined with cafés at night, for example), which prompted the guide to remark with a smile, “We are now about to walk through a Van Gogh painting.”

The tour concluded at the Sacré Ceur, a white church built ontop of Montemarte’s hill in order to celebrate the reunion of Paris with the rest of the country at the end of the 19th century. Inside the church, an interesting combination Judaic, Muslim and Christian architecture, is a plaque that says something decidedly French: “God commanded the people of Paris to build a church. The congress took a vote and the measure won by 247 to 116.” (Or whatever the numbers were.) In France, even God’s orders must be debated and ratified by the government.

I devoted an entire day to the Louvre, which is utterly massive both in its physical size and the scope of its treasures. Over the course of six highly-caffeinated hours, I sampled a bit of every exhibit. My favorite parts were the ancient Egyptian, Greek and Mesopotamian artifacts, which were anywhere from two to seven thousand years old. I also saw hundreds of French, Italian and Flemish paintings, so many that by the end of my Louvre marathon, I was so sick of paintings I was actually repulsed by the sight of them. As I finally left the museum, I had to shield my eyes from the paintings I passed.

Fortunately I went to the Musée d’Orsay, the Impressionist museum, a couple days before getting “painting-ed out” in the Louvre. The impressionist works of Van Gogh, Monet and others were a nice change to the onslaught of religious and royal paintings from the Medieval to Baroque periods that I see most everywhere else. I especially love how the Impressionists depict reflections on water.

On Monday, my fourth day in Paris, I had another day on my Eurail pass to burn (again because of the Lyon train incident, since I was planning on using it to go from Grenoble to Paris). I asked my couchsurf host, Freddy, a guy who lives in the city center and who has hosted hundreds of travelers, where I should go, and he recommended Lille or Strasbourg. I chose Lille because it’s only an hour away, located on the Belgian border.

Like Siena to Florence, Lille was a good antidote to its larger, more tourist-y neighbor, Paris. The prices in Lille are also down on earth, a good change from Paris, where prices are in the stratosphere. After chatting about football with an NFL-crazed worker at the tourist office, I wandered around the charming, quiet little city’s medieval center.

After returning to Paris on a train that zoomed through the countryside at 200 mph, I walked to the Père Lachaise cemetery on the east side of town, where Frédéric Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and other famous people are buried. While studying the cemetery’s map, I met two American girls who are just beginning their semester abroad in Paris and talked with them for a while. I could hardly contain my jealousy of their upcoming adventures (except for the prices they will have to pay in Paris, which I noticed were often three to four times the prices in Granada). Oscar Wilde’s grave is a huge, narrow angel that people kiss with lipstick; it is covered with hundreds of kiss marks, and a couple of people even spread the love and kissed the relief of a face on the neighboring grave. At Jim Morrison’s grave, a veritable tourist attraction in Paris, people in the past have smoked, done drugs, even had sex on his grave, but now a metal fence surrounds it. A British girl looking at Jim’s grave poignantly remarked that the cigarette lying on his grave is “the only thing rock-and-roll about his grave right now.”

For food in Paris, I ate exclusively from grocery stores (usually a baguette, a little block of cheese and, if I felt like splurging, an apple), which still cost a lot, and occasionally street food. I ate some croissants so flaky and delicious they were almost life-changing. Sampling different types of crêpes was fun, too. Part of the fun was just watching the person make it: they use a roller to evenly spread the batter, then after it’s done cooking they fold the crêpe in half, paint the semicircle with nutella/egg/whatever, sprinkle on other ingredients, and fold it in half twice more to make a pie-shaped mass of goodness that you can easily eat while walking.

On my last night in Europe, I accompanied my couchsurf host to a weekly couchsurfing party held at a pub in the Latin Quarter, where they have a pub quiz every Monday. I talked about the American primaries with a Parisian, about traveling in eastern Asia with a Japanese, and about traveling in Australia with a soldier in the Australian army. When I used the last of my euros, Guillermo, a Spaniard living in Paris with whom I reminisced about Spain, bought me another beer. “Ah, my last beer in Europe” I exclaimed. “In my culture,” he explained, “we never say, ‘This is my last beer,’ but rather my penultimate. It’s always the penultimate.”

May this not be my last adventure around this great world, but instead merely one in a series of penultimate adventures.

Pictures from Paris
Pictures from Lille

A Journey to Paris Full of Surprises

2008-01-10T23:46:00.000+01:00

A couple of unexpected events have utterly changed the end of my trip. First, since my 2007 train timetable is now outdated, the train from Milan to Lyon that I tried to take simply doesn’t exist anymore. As a result, I found myself in Milan early Thursday morning with four hours of sleep and eight hours to kill before the next train to Lyon. I wandered around the shopping district – Milan is the capital of Italy’s fashion industry – and checked out its famous duomo, a mesmerizing mix of Gothic and Baroque that took five centuries to complete. I also ate at a popular place near the duomo called Luini, which serves Panzerotti, a sort of Italian empanada that is more bread-y and less greasy than its Mexican cousin. It’s one of those famous, popular places that as you get near it you seem more and more people eating its panzerotti.

After my five-hour train to Lyon, I immediately got off the train at the one and only stop in Lyon. However, I was unsure whether there would be another stop in Lyon (in case there were multiple stations) since the conductor simply announced “Lyon,” so I got back on the train to ask if this was indeed my stop. As soon as I found out this was the stop indicated on my ticket, the doors closed. I hit the open button repeatedly, but it was too late; I was locked in. I was irate. I was supposed to meet a family friend at the station and spend the weekend with her family!

I asked what the next stop was, certain that the train would stop in the next town just five or ten minutes later. “Paris,” a man replied. You’re kidding me. This train doesn’t stop till the other side of the country?

Stuck on the train and utterly helpless, I found an open seat and opened my guidebook to the Paris section, frantically searching for a hostel that I could easily find and walk to at midnight. With no money on my cell phone, I borrowed a French guy’s phone to call the friend waiting to meet me at the station to tell her what happened. (It turns out there are, in fact, two train stations in Lyon, and she was waiting for me at the other one, so maybe it was good after all that I stayed on the train.) I cringed every time the door to the car opened, afraid that it would be someone checking tickets to make sure everyone’s destination really says Paris on their ticket, but thankfully no one did.

Pictures from my unexpected visit to Milan

Cinque Terre

2008-01-10T19:53:00.000+01:00

I thought Genoa (pronounced with the accent is on the ‘e’; in Italian it’s “Genova”) would be cool to see because it used to be one of the five maritime republics, but it wasn’t. It might have been cool if I still cared for seeing yet more religious paintings, and while the historic center had some charm, the port was huge, and some architect had the gall to build a noisy, hideous freeway overpass right over the seafront piazza.

At mid-morning, already bored by the city, I glanced at the map of Italy in my guidebook, curious where exactly Genoa is located. What I saw on the map changed my mindset from killing time to savoring time: a dot just south of Genoa read “Cinque Terre.” I immediately headed for the train station.

Cinque Terre is a group of five small towns built into the steep coastline along the Mediterranean. Their densely packed, colorful buildings perched in the scarce flat land found amongst the steep slopes effuse a charm that is famous worldwide. In fact, the Cinque Terre was on the list of destinations in Italy that I wanted to visit on this trip, but before today I had thought that I wouldn’t be able to go.

After an hour and a half train ride (costing just 4 euro and change, woo!), I was in Monterosso, the northernmost town of the Cinque Terre, and started hiking south along the coastline. I foolishly started out with jeans and four upper layers, but it was so warm that after just ten minutes I had stripped down to a T-shirt and rolled up my pants.

Cinque Terre is also a national park that surrounds the five towns and contains several hiking and biking paths. I chose the coastal path, where, being low season, I passed only a handful of other tourists. Hiking up stone steps and along hiking paths to charming, old towns reminded me of hiking in Las Alpujarras, the former-Moorish towns in the mountains near Granada.

Two reasons prevented me from hiking to the fourth and fifth towns: (1) I neglected to bring picnic food from Genoa and didn’t feel like eating at one of the expensive restaurants (where menu items included, for example, boiled octopus for 12 euro), and (2) after passing through a row of shacks that seemed terribly out of place, a locked gate blocked the path for reasons I couldn’t understand because the government’s sign was in Italian. Oh well, the three of the Cinque Terre that I saw were plenty, and I was hungry.

Back in Genoa, I walked along a street full of foreigners and immigrants and hence phone centers and ethnic grocery stores. I decided to skip the many kebab places and ate at a tacquería, where I got two cheap, bland tacos, my first Mexican food in months. I sometimes dream of good burritos, and I can’t wait to go to the little tacquería on Park St. in Madison.

I couchsurfed both nights in Genoa with Alessandro, a thirty-year old engineer with decent English and a love for Australia. On the first night, an Australian friend of his came over; it was fun to talk with her about her random jobs and adventures in Europe. (She hiked the Camino de Santiago and said it was all about drinking tons of wine while hiking. I really would like to do this someday.) On the second night, we went across town to a party where there were more couchsurfers, including an interesting pair from Canada and Australia who are also bumming around Europe. They travel in a cheap van they bought for 5,000 euro with 10-euro bikes on the back, doing various little jobs around Europe. They introduced me to www.wwoof.com and www.helpx.net, two sites reminiscent of couchsurfing in which you work 4-5 hours per day and get food and a place to stay. People post jobs to the website, such as painting their shed or helping to harvest crops. Sometimes they will teach you the skills you need, so that you can learn some useful skills at the same time. (Let’s say you want to learn how to make goat’s cheese; you can search for jobs regarding just that.) They are a great way to meet people, learn skills and see the country.

This marks the end of my three-week tour d’Italia. I feel like I have really seen the country: I visited eight cities, skied the Alps and hiked the Cinque Terre, saw all the big sights and plenty of little ones, stayed with couchsurfers and the Pavaninis, and sampled many different foods and drinks. The only city I feel I missed is Naples (along with the obligatory day-trip to nearby Pompeii), so I am leaving the south of Italy for another trip.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times recently on Italy and its general “malaise,” which is worth a read (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/13/world/europe/13italy.html?hp). Italians, according to the article, are the least happy of all Europeans; competition from China is forcing its manufacturers to stress the “beauty” and “culture” that a “Made In Italy” tag on merchandise guarantees; and the government in Rome is notoriously inefficient and ineffective.

Four pictures from Genoa
Pictures from the Cinque Terre

The Most Famous Tower in the World

2008-01-09T19:48:00.000+01:00

On my train ride north from Rome to Genoa on Tuesday, I stopped at Pisa to see its famous tower; I’m glad I was there for just a few hours, because all that’s all there is to do in Pisa. However, it is a university town, so I went to a place that’s popular with students and got a chickpea pancake and a focaccia with spinach and ricotta cheese using my broken Italian.

Despite having seen it countless times in pictures, the leaning tower, like the Roman Coliseum, still takes you by surprise. The overhang is five meters, yet amazingly the structure is nevertheless stable. Because of the lean, the tower has structural problems that it otherwise wouldn’t have had, for example greater compression forces on the leaning side and problems due to moisture and mold. It’s been gorgeously renovated recently, so most of the columns may not be original but they look pristinely white. You can climb it if you pay money, but for me and most other tourists the tower is simply a fun backdrop for taking pictures.

A few pics of Pisa

When In Rome...

2008-01-07T21:01:00.000+01:00

Take pictures of yourself in front of the Coliseum. I mean, you’ve gotta. It’s the freaking Coliseum. All stadiums built since then have been modeled after it. Upon completion in 80 AD, the emperor, Titus, celebrated with 100 days of games, and its architect was fed alive to animals as reward for his work. The place embodies audacity, daring, aggression, gore and courage. My testosterone levels rose just by looking at the place.

Seeing the Coliseum in Rome, more than any other sight in the former capital of the great empire, was like seeing David in Florence. For one, it’s famous to the point of cliché. You’ve seen it a thousands times in pictures, yet you’re still giddy as you walk across the city toward it. Then all of the sudden you catch a glimpse of it. “Holy ballsack, there it is.” You gander for a second, but then you turn away hoping that, when you look again, you can somehow recreate that stirring moment of first sight. You get closer up and stare for a good twenty minutes, moving around to see it from every angle. Your mind is blown. It’s way more spectacular than in pictures.

The other thing that I will remember most about Rome, besides the jaw-dropping Coliseum, is how few digits there are in the dates of the things you see there: 39 BC, 72 AD, 132 AD, …. I remember seeing a sign in which some Roman had carved the date “14 AD.” Year fourteen. How often do you talk about years with just two digits in them?

I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of ruins. I think they leave a bit too much to the imagination. I mean, it’s great that the foundations of, say, the four corners of your bedroom survived till today, but I need a bit more than a few of piles of stone to get a sense of what your house looked like. For this reason, my two favorite sights in Rome were the Coliseum (duh) and the Pantheon, the most complete Roman structure in the city, completed in 125 AD.

To me, St. Peter’s Basilica was just like any other Baroque church – it even had that same distinctive smell of a church – only this one is several times larger in volume. (It’s the largest church in the world.) Looking around at the over-the-top marble and bronze decoration inside, the thought that kept coming into my head was: “This is tacky.” Maybe if I were more religious I would have appreciated it more.

Outside, however, I loved Piazza San Pietro, where scores of pillars arranged in the shape of two large arms encompass the huge, cobblestone square. The orderly array of pillars create an effect that reminded me of passing corn fields in a car: some pillars line up perfectly, while its neighbors progressively fan out more and more.

I love seeing squares/plazas/piazze/trg (that last one is Slovenian) much more than castles, museums or any other common tourist sight. For one, squares are what the locals use frequently, for meeting places or just passing through. They are much more a part of everyday life than, say, the courtyard of a castle or the exhibits in a museum. The other reason I love seeing squares is that they’re free and they never close on Sundays, unlike all too many other tourist sights.

On a related note, I didn’t pay a single penny to see tourist sights while in Rome. For example, instead of dropping a colossal entry fee (11 euro) to see the Coliseum, I contented myself with peering in from the outside. You’d be surprised by how much of expensive sights you can see just by peering from the entrance or from the outside. In total, I paid just 55 euros in Rome on food and two nights in a hostel. I have eight days to go and a hundred euros left in my pocket. I am curious to see if I can make it.

Pictures from Rome

Oh, Siena!

2008-01-05T21:52:00.000+01:00

I am not in Rome as planned. On a whim I decided to come to Siena instead because as I planned out my remaining 12 days I found I had an extra day to fill. Why Siena? A Mexican I met in Bologna had told me that Siena was beautiful, and my guidebook claims that it is “the perfect antidote to its better-known neighbor (Florence),” is a lively university town, and has what has been called the most beautiful square in the world. I was sold.

During the Middle Ages Siena controlled much of southern Tuscany and was a major city in Europe. From that era remains a spectacular Romanesque/Gothic cathedral that looks like a zebra both inside and out due to its alternating black and white marble. The whole “centro storico” is a charming web of narrow, medieval streets that are a pleasure to walk around. The other highlight of Siena is Il Campo, the square (though it’s shaped more like a clamshell than a quadrilateral) that has been called the most beautiful in the world. The most sensational festival in Italy, the Siena Palio, a balls-out, bareback horse race, is held around this café-lined square twice a year in the summer.

I stayed in another HI hostel located, as always, in the ’burbs. My roommate in a double room was Cristobal from Santiago, Chile, who is in Siena to try out for their soccer team in a couple of days. (¡Buena suerte, hombre!) I showed him a bunch of my pictures from my travels and tried to convince him to move to San Sebastian or Granada and try out for their soccer teams.

Pictures from Siena

Florence Could Be Confused As an Italian-Themed Amusement Park in America

2008-01-04T21:39:00.000+01:00

What a tourist fest. I haven’t seen so many tourists swarming so few locals – and this is supposedly “low” tourist season. In the center of the city, I must have seen ten tourists for every local, and most of those locals were working in museums, gelaterias, pizzerias or some other tourist-related venue. For this reason, Florence seemed to me less like a city in Italy and more like an Italian-themed amusement park that you mind find in America.

Also, after being with only Italians for fourteen days, it was a bit strange to suddenly see tons of Americans. Seeing and hearing so many Americans was both comforting and bothersome. I guess this is a taste of the culture shock I will get in less than two weeks.

On the train from Bologna I met three nice Georgia girls whose accents were so undetectable they could have passed for northerners. I ended up staying in a 4-bed room with them in a nice 23-euro-a-night hostel for two nights. They were the first Americans I hung out with since Granada, almost three weeks ago.

I really could only stand to stay in Florence long enough to see the main sights, though there is enough to do to spend a week. On the first night we toured the Medici palace and gazed at chalices, jewelry and other objects that were so intricate and ornate you could stare at them for twenty minutes each. (The Medici family ruled much of Italy for 150 years and were famous for poisoning people.)

We also caught our first view of the Duomo that first night. I thought its name was actually the Duomo, but it turns out that “duomo” means “the main church in a city,” so I guess every city has a duomo. What struck me about the Duomo (in Florence) was the color of its green stones, since I am used to the granite and other less colorful rocks that make up cathedrals in Spain.

Friday was art overload: we saw the two most important art galleries in Florence, the Accademia and the Ufizzi. The reason you go to the Accademia is for Michelangelo’s David, which in person is absolutely breathtaking. Seeing David is almost transcendental. First of all, he’s huge (he measures over 17 feet tall), which clashes with the idea I had that he should be small and Goliath should be big. He is posing in a contraposte form (a Spanish term that I am not sure how to translate to English) in which one leg is tense and the other is relaxed, which emphasizes the muscles. Around his back he is holding the sling that he just used to defeat Goliath. Everything is sculpted with perfection – the muscles, the ribs, the neck, even the veins and tendons in the hands – except for his right hand, which Michelangelo deliberately made too large (perhaps to show that he is righteous and good?). To me he represents humans conquering the world around them with wit rather than pure brawn.

One of the nice things about seeing David is that all other sculpture now pales in comparison, so now I don’t have to worry about paying for more museum entrances to see sculpture because it won’t match the technical brilliance of David. I had to go to the Ufizzi, however, since it is supposedly the greatest art gallery in Italy (and thus costs a whopping 13 euro). The two highlights for me were the scores of statues, sarcophagi, urns and other artwork from Roman times in the two long corridors – things so old that when you see something from the 4th century A.D. you think it’s recent in comparison to the others that were made from before Christ. The other highlight was some of the paintings by the great Italian artists; I saw works by each of the four “Ninja Turtles” (Rafael, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Donatello). It was fun to mooch off of other tour groups in English or Spanish and learn about how, say, this was the first time someone faithfully painted velvet (and it looks just like velvet), or this is the Florentine method of painting (draw and fill it in with color) whereas this is the Venetian method (color it).

Several friends of mine who had separately visited Florence all told me to eat at Za-Za. It is one of those restaurants that has so much character that you want to buy one of their namesake T-shirts. I got the “Za-Za pizza” to go, and it was practically orgasmic: it had pesto, truffle cream, prosciutto, mozzarella and a little mountain of basil leaves. I love how the toppings on good Italian pizze (the plural of pizza) are haphazardly strewn about the surface, whereas the toppings on American pizze tend to be evenly spread out. It’s kindof fun to have a bite of all prosciutto, then a bite loaded with enough basil leaves that it could be a salad, then a bite with just mozzarella, etc.

I learned some interesting things about Italy from one of the Georgian girls who is teaching English for a year in Verona. (Note that when I say “Italians,” I really mean “Italians in some geographic area and not all all of Italians” since Italy is conglomeration of very distinct provinces.) For example, Italians like to say “ciao” a lot when they say goodbye, often two or three (or more) times really quickly: “ciao ciao ciao!” (It kindof sounds like a machinegun.) They also are bold people without much self-consciousness: for example, there isn’t really a translation of the word “awkward,” a word very frequently used in the U.S.

22 Pictures from Florence

Bologna: a Sandwich Meat and a Beautiful City

2008-01-03T10:36:00.000+01:00

I am back to wandering cities and checking my guidebook or city map every thirty seconds…

I stayed two nights at an awful Hostelling International (HI) hostel located 6 km outside of the city center. Its distance was annoying not only because I had to take a bus to get there, but also because many bus lines don’t run on New Year’s Day, so on the first night it took me hours to finally get there. On the second night, the bus driver dropped me off a half kilometer past it, so I recognized nothing nearby, and I slowly wandered back along the dark highway and found it.

Once inside the hostel things were even worse. While HI seems to be a worthy organization, they try to squeeze money out of you by charging for every little extra thing: a euro to borrow a towel, for example, or 3.50 euro per hour for Internet on the one single computer.

Despite being dead tired, I slept poorly on a bed with a valley-shaped mattress located just 6 feet from an old guy with an unceasing, thunderous snore. Maybe I just have too high of standards after staying in Hostel Celica in Ljubljana, which was cheap, comfortable, charming and lively.

Anyways, on to the city. It reminded me of Santiago de Compostela in that the centro storico has a somewhat uniform architecture that teems with arches and arcades, though while Santiago has a grey, stone appearance, Bologna’s is more orange and clay-red.

I spent all of Wednesday wandering the city. Three highlights deserve mention. First is Piazza Maggiore, the center of it all: it’s one of those picturesque, main European squares filled with pigeons and people and surrounded by cool-looking buildings that, as you stroll through it, makes you think “Wow, I am in Europe.”

Just down the street is what’s called Due Torri (Two Towers), two of several remaining towers from the Middle Ages, when some 180 such towers dominated the Bolognese skyline. The shorter tower, Torre Garisenda, leans at an angle that rivals that of the Tower of Pisa, while the taller tower, Torre degli Asinelli, which I climbed (3 euro), measuring 97 meters high, commands a great view of the city and surrounding hills. The tower’s wooden steps are dangerously narrow – so narrow at points that they ruined my right shoe: my shoes have a strange lacing system called Boa that is tightened by a knob on the back, which accidentally hit one of the steps and now no longer keeps the laces tight. (Thanks, Torre degli Asinelli.)

The third highlight of the city for me was the Archiginnasio, a building down the street from Piazza Maggiore built in 1565 to gather Bologna’s university, till then scattered among several places since its foundation in 1088, into one building. Today it is a university library and museum that has rotating exhibits (the current one is on G. Carducci, some famous Bolognese poet I had never heard of). The coolest part is the Teatro Anatomico, the original medical school dissection theatre, consisting of a marble table for the cadaver surrounded by wooden tiers of seats. The second coolest part of the Archiginnasio is the monuments to professors and shields with symbols on them that decorate the entire building. The third coolest part: the Allied powers bombed much of the Archiginnasio to bits in an air raid on January 29, 1945, so much of what you see today is reconstructed.

Pictures from Bologna

Trieste, Venice and Skiing in the Alps with the Pavaninis

2008-01-01T15:48:00.000+01:00

I haven’t written to the blog in a while, so I’ll quickly recap the highlights of the past two (amazing) weeks.

I arrived in Trieste by train at night on Thursday, December 20th and couchsurfed with a twenty-year old film student, Ilaria, who studied abroad in Atlanta, GA last year. On Friday morning she gave me a map and marked all of Trieste’s highlights (probably the best way to find out what sights you should see is straight from a local), so that day I walked around the city to all of the sights she had marked. Back at Ilaria’s apartment, she made pasta and her roommate shared with me some cookie-shaped bread things that had olives in it, a specialty of southern Italy (where he is from), and his homemade, highly-sweetened espresso, made in his own secret way.

That evening I met up with Nina in the most famous piazza in the city just after she finished an exam. We hung out at her apartment for a while and then went out and got a pizza baked in a wood-oven – my first pizza in months.

On Saturday we drove from Trieste to Venice, stopping at IKEA on the way, in the Pavaninis’ van. We stayed in Venice for three relaxing days, during which I mostly hung out with Nina, Fosca and Mario at their new apartment in Venice (they don’t live in Lido anymore) and went along on errands. It was interesting to “live” in Venice, that is, to experience it as someone who lives there rather than as a tourist. The only sightseeing I did was one evening walk around the city with Nina, and the only sight that I deliberately sought out was St. Mark’s square. However I did get to see a lot of the city while doing errands and going out at night with Nina and her friends.

On Christmas Eve we kids (the parents are in India for a wedding) walked across Venice to an aunt’s house for dinner with the whole family on Nina’s father’s side. This is the first time I have spent Christmas away from home and family – yet not really since this is a sort of second family for me here. After a dinner of fish and an unusual baked pasta with raisins, people opened gifts. Nina’s aunt gave me a mug that was hand-made in Lido and has a skyline of Venice at night painted on it, a good souvenir since I mostly saw Venice when it was dark (not too difficult when the sun sets at 5 p.m.).

On Christmas morning, Nina and I gave out the gifts we had gotten for each other and for Fosca and Mario. That afternoon we took a three-hour train to the Dolomite Mountains, where we spent the next several days skiing. What an amazing week in the mountains that was! It was really fun to spend time with Nina and to get to know her siblings, relatives and friends. Though it hadn’t snowed there for thirty days, the snow conditions were still pretty good. I learned a bit of Italian on my own with a small “Italian for travelers” book, but I could only learn a few tenses and a select few of the most common verbs, so my speaking abilities were limited. However, rest assured, I did learn the essentials: the Italian swear words and how to say “cool” in Venetian.

Every night we cooked dinner at home (usually pasta), but one night we went out to a restaurant a half-hour walk away with some friends and relatives. That meal, I told Nina afterwards, was definitely one of the top three of my life. First of all, there was the setting – in the freakin’ Alps – and the star-lit walk to the restaurant. Far from cities and high up in the mountains, the view of the stars was unbelievable; I craned my neck nearly the whole time trying to soak up the view. Then there was the food: nearly everyone, including myself, ordered a dish whose name I didn’t fully understand. All I knew is that it had pig in it. It turns out it was ribs (heaven!), which is tied with avocado for my favorite food. Topped off with a ricotta cheese dessert and a digestive of grappa (which according to my dictionary is “an Italian brandy that is distilled from what remains of grapes after they have been pressed for winemaking”), it was clear this meal – and the whole atmosphere surrounding it – was one of the top three in my life. (The other two are suckling pig in Segovia and pinxto bar crawling in San Sebastian.)

After a full day of skiing on New Year’s Eve, I met Nina’s parents for the first time and got to talk with them a bit over hot chocolate in a café. They had funny stories from India, such as the taxi drivers who don’t know their way around Dubai and Indians’ tendency to say things like “more better” and “more colder.” Nina’s parents seem like warm and fun people, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising, knowing Nina.

About fifteen of Nina’s friends came on the train from Venice that day to celebrate New Year’s at their mountain house. What a fun night: people tried their English with me, we sang some Italian drinking songs, and we celebrated the first few seconds of 2008 by popping champagne corks and watching fireworks set off around the base of the mountain.

After a difficult goodbye to Nina and family this morning, I am on the train now to Bologna, Europe’s oldest university town. Navigating the gondola, bus and train this morning, I flexed nearly my entire Italian vocabulary: where, should, to be, to need to, to cost, OK, thanks, bye.

As Nina’s friends taught me, my week and a half with Nina and Co. was “Beeeeaaaaaaa!”

Pictures from Trieste

Pictures from Venice (only 3, all taken at night, since I wasn't really a "tourist" in Venice)

Pictures from Alpe di Siusi

I Don’t Even Know How to Pronounce the Name of Where I am Right Now

2007-12-20T13:57:00.000+01:00

I can pronounce the country—that’s easy: Slovenia. What I’m not quite sure how to pronounce is the city, Ljubljana. In fact, that’s part of the reason why I chose to come here for a few days. (The other two reasons were that it’s close to Venice and because freshman year I had an awesome math TA from Slovenia.) From searching on the Internet for the correct pronunciation and from hearing it spoken by locals, it’s something like “LYOO-bl-yahna.” If I were smart I would have been able to figure this out since my math TA’s name was Jernej, which he told us is pronounced “Yer-NAY” (that is, j’s are pronounced like y’s). However, I still like to say it the way I originally thought it was pronounced, in which I pronounce every letter in sight as if it were English: “Luh-JOO-bul-jahna.” I’m in LAJOOBILJANA!

The lack of vowels in the language was the first thing I noticed in Slovenia. I’ve seen some words on signs that are eight or more letters long but have just one or two vowels. As I walked through the dark night to my hostel the first night, I tried to read every sign I passed and chuckled to myself every time because of how funny they sounded in my awful pronunciation; Njegoseva, Resljeva, Vrhovceva…

I’ve been to a fair number of hostels, but none can even compare to the one in which I stayed in Ljubljana: Hostel Celica. (Another pronunciation lesson: I learned from a local Ljubljanian on the airport shuttle that it’s not pronounced “SELL-eeka” as I had thought (I naturally pronounced it like it was Spanish), but instead it’s “TSELL-eetsa.” That “ts” sound is like a sparkle in your mouth.) Anyways, within the word “Celica” is the word “cell,” which is fitting since the building is a renovated prison. All the rooms are unique former prison cells with the bars and all – except for mine apparently, since I chose the cheapest one, a five-bed dormitory room, which due to its slanted ceiling looks like it used to be the prison’s attic. It’s ironic to think that what used to be a place of misery is now an artfully designed hostel. What’s more, Hostel Celica is a tourist sight itself: there’s an art gallery, a bar that serves excellent Slovenian beers on tap (Lasko Pivo, with a v-shaped accent over the ‘s’) and affordable Slovenian and Italian dishes, free internet, outdoor seating, regular parties and other events such as live music, a buffet breakfast included, on and on – all for 16 euro a night (at least for my room, the cheapest). Lonely Planet certainly was accurate when they labeled Hostel Celica the “hippest hostel in the world.”

Being a European capital city, I thought it would take me at least two days to see Ljubljana, but despite my efforts to calmly and thoroughly see the big sights so that it would take me two days, I saw the whole city in a day. As I walked around, I occasionally listened on my iPod to what turned out to be the perfect album for Ljubljana, Gogol Bordello’s “Super Taranta!” – perfect since Bordello, a Chernobyl survivor with a Ukrainian accent, kindof sounds like the Slovenians here. His music and voice reminds me of the hilarious Ukrainian guy in the movie “Everything Is Illuminated” (one of my most favorite movies).

Ljubljana was once a Roman city called Emona (to this day they are unearthing remains from this time period) supposedly founded by Jason and the Argonauts. At one point I walked along a hundred-meter stretch of the Roman wall; it was a lot smaller than the Roman wall I walked ontop of in Lugo in Galicia in the north of Spain, which was rare in that the Roman wall completely surrounded the old quarter. Ljubljana is located in a strategic trading position at the intersection of three rivers, just south of some mountains and north of what used to be marshland. The old part of town is located on a bend in the River Ljubljanica; on one side of the bend is a castle perched atop a steep hill. (I could see as I climbed the steep hill how the peasants failed to overthrow the castle during the Middle Ages.) The castle, built in the 12th century but destroyed by an earthquake and later rebuilt in the 16th century, was rather unremarkable as castles go (wow am I blasé), but its clock tower affords a great view of the city and the snow-covered Julian Alps on the horizon. The city viewed from above – colorful, medieval façades and red tile roofs densely clustered along the river – reminds me a lot of the view from the church in Old Town Square in Prague (which happens to be one of my most favorite sights in Europe). The castle also had a cool 3D Virtual Museum of the city that provided a good preview for what I was about to see around the city.

Along the river there are some interesting bridges, a huge market, lots of “pavement cafés” (as my guidebook calls them), and colorful squares. It was really nice to have some non-Spanish food and non-Spanish beer. (Sorry, Spain, I love ya, but I got kinda sick of Iberian ham and uninspired beer). The food is reminiscent of German and Czech food – sausages, goulash, etc. I bought two delicious apples from the open-air market and an extra-long sausage from a pavement café, where as soon as the vendor found out I’m from the U.S. he asked the standard question – whether or not I liked Bush. (“No, I like Barack Obama,” I told him. “He’s going to be president next year.”)

The other highlight from Ljubljana was its Contemporary History Museum, which skillfully showed Slovenia’s storied 20th century history. Slovenia went through two world wars (including battles within its borders), a painful Communist reign as a part of Yugoslavia, and a ten-day war for independence in 1991. I was the only visitor at the museum, so the curator showed me around and pressed hidden buttons that started visual displays for me. (The week before Christmas must be a slow tourist time for Ljubljana, in fact, since I had a whole row of seats to myself on the airplane, I am the only person in my five-bed room, I saw about seven other tourists at the castle, I was the only visitor at the Contemporary History Museum, and I have yet to meet another American.)

At night I’ve been walking toward the train station to eat a burek, a Slavic street food that is a flaky, pastry-like spiral that is filled with cheese or meat. I like to flex my Slovenian vocabulary whenever I order something: ena (one) burek prosim (please), hvala (thank you). Nearly everyone here starts talking to me in Slovenian, so I maybe look a little Slovenian. It’s fun to see what words in Slovenian look familiar to me. I remember that according to the book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” the words that appear familiar are the words that people used frequently before the Indo-European language split into several languages. People had sheep back then, for example, so the word for sheep is similar from Spanish to Italian to Russian. I’ve also read elsewhere that frequently used words, such as “two,” rarely change, while less frequently used words, such as “stomach,” change more frequently over time. That’s probably why the Slovenian word for one, “ena” looks a lot like “uno” in Spanish, “one” in English, “uno” in Italian...

On Wednesday I went to a popular tourist destination called Lake Bled. While the name may sound macabre, the lake was anything but: it’s a serene lake in the Julian Alps that has a thousand-year old castle perched on a steep cliff and a small island with a church on it. The scenery was unbelievable.

I had some excitement on the bus ride. First, before the bus ride I couldn’t withdraw any money from the ATM’s here (I think because my bank didn’t know I was traveling to Slovenia), so when I paid for the 6 euro bus ticket, I didn’t have enough money left in my pocket for the return trip. I went anyways, trusting that I could somehow get another euro at Lake Bled so that I could pay for the return trip.

Second, because I frantically tried to withdraw money from multiple ATM’s before catching the bus, I wasn’t able to find a bathroom. The bus driver wouldn’t wait for me to run to the bathroom, so I was faced with an hour and fifteen minute bus ride on an already full bladder. Fortunately I had brought a Lanjarón water bottle that I got for free at the Sierra Nevada. However, both it and my liter-sized Nalgene were filled to the top. Unfortunately I couldn’t open a window to dump water out, so my only option was to chug the 0.4 L Lanjarón water bottle and, well, fill it right back up, if you know what I mean. It was a funny compromise since I replaced every milliliter that I expelled. Essentially it delayed agony by about an hour – just enough time to arrive at Lake Bled.

Anyway, back to Lake Bled, I walked around half of the lake with some Singapore students who are studying in New Castle, UK, whom I met on the bus ride (this was after the water bottle incident that I met them). They were funny because they took tons of pictures, often of stuff I found uninteresting, and absolutely loved to do poses. This made them painfully slow, which made me realize how nice it can be to travel and sightsee alone.

Thankfully I was able to get the extra euro I needed for the return trip by paying for two other guys’ entrance to the castle with my credit card, so at 5 p.m. I returned to Ljubljana hungry and without money. Fortunately the ATM at the train station worked, so I immediately bought a jufka kebab, essentially a Slovenian burrito, and wolfed it down.

Staying with my couchsurfing contact Wednesday night fell through since I couldn’t call her using my Spanish phone, so I stayed in Celica another night. I went out to the center of town that night to see what Ljubljana is like at night. What I found were crowds of people in the city center drinking hot wine at the pavement cafés along the river. Everyone is fashionably bundled up and gripping a plastic cup of piping hot wine.

Pictures from Ljubljana

Pictures from Lake Bled

Pictures of My Host Family

2007-12-20T13:35:00.000+01:00

When I asked Obduli if I could take a picture of us on our last night, she refused because she was dressed in her pajamas. I said "Whatever, that doesn't matter!" but she wouldn't budge, so instead she had me take pictures of pictures in her house of her when she was dressed well.

Obduli & Luis

Ana Mari, Obduli, Luis, Caro

Final Banquet, Sierra Nevada

2007-12-16T13:11:00.000+01:00

On Thursday night we had our final banquet at a nice restaurant at the foot of the hill of the Alhambra. It was fun to all be together one last time, but it was bittersweet since it meant we had to start saying goodbye to many close friends, say goodbye to Granada and to this whole experience. The semester went by so quickly.

After dinner, a couple of people started their journey back to the U.S., while most of us went out together to a couple of bars. One of our teachers (like at Thanksgiving, our teachers party with us) took us to a favorite place of hers where the DJ’s play 50’s style, funky dance music. Around 3 a.m. we went to our favorite discoteca, Vogue, where we danced the night away. I returned home just before 7 a.m. hungry since I didn’t pass any kebab places that were open at such a late (early?) hour. As I walked in the door, my señora had just woken up and was walking to the bathroom, which was an awkward moment: “–Your just coming home now? –Uh, sí.”

On Friday I packed my suitcase and climbed to the lookout plaza in the Albayzin around 6 p.m. to catch a view of the Alhambra at sunset. (You can’t expect to do much after such a monumental night out.) That night I fell asleep at 9:30 p.m. and slept soundly for 11 glorious hours.

On Saturday I hopped on a bus to the Sierra Nevada, the ski resort half an hour from Granada that you can see behind the Alhambra. With a bocadillo in my backpack, I was hoping to spend a few hours hiking around, but strangely there were guards that blocked entrance to the paths. I ended up wandering around the mountain village for an hour and a half and caught the next bus back to Granada. I could have taken the gondola halfway up the mountain for fifteen euros, but I thought that was far too pricey. Right now there is a little bit of natural snow on the top of the mountain but not enough to ski on, so they created a narrow area of artificial snow, just like they had to for the European ski championships a few years ago.

A few pics from the Sierra Nevada

Fotos de Sevilla

2007-12-13T13:40:00.000+01:00

It took a while to upload the 70 pictures I took in Sevilla: http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100400

All About My Mother

2007-12-11T21:53:00.000+01:00

Obduli, my señora, said something that resonated with me the other day over lunch: “We’re going to miss you, Carlos.” (By the way, it’s funny how I am very used to the name Carlos now; even my American friends think of me as Carlos.) My señora and señor have hosted several students over the past few years, but I will be the last. They are going to renovate their apartment soon, and during the renovation a student won’t be able to live in the house. Also, the health of Obduli’s mother, who is in her eighties, is deteriorating, so my señora travels south to her pueblo every weekend to take care of her.

My main connections with Obduli are through meals. We eat lunch together every day, and it’s usually just us two since Luis can rarely make it home from work for lunch. The TV is always on with the news while we eat, which conveniently fills any dead spots in our conversations. Most of the news is Spanish or European, but there is a surprising amount of news regarding the U.S. – its foreign policy, its freakish stories (shootings, terrible weather that causes deaths, etc.) and even its Hollywood celebrities. These stories make for good conversation pieces for me, since it’s something I am familiar with and can easily relate to Obduli. They just showed tonight, for example, images of the snow and ice in the northern U.S., which has caused twenty-two deaths. “Ha, that’s where I live!” I told Obduli, who is deathly afraid of the cold (she believes that being cold causes the cold and sore throats).

Obduli is also (thank God) a good cook. She has taught me how to do certain Spanish staples, such as fried fish or fabada (cooked garbanzos with bits of chorizo). I plan on trying to recreate a lot of her dishes when I have to cook for myself next spring. It’s only too bad that many of the foods that are so plentiful and cheap here in Spain (baguettes, olive oil, fish, avocados, etc.) will be more expensive in Wisconsin. I will also miss having crates upon crates of avocados, oranges, mandarin oranges and chirimoyas in the kitchen; they’re so plentiful in our kitchen that you can eat a bunch of each and barely make a dent in the number left in the crates. I’ve grown dangerously accustomed to breakfasts of toast covered with olive oil, a dash of salt an entire avocado ontop, since this will be a costly habit back at home.

While living in a house with a señora and señor can be frustrating at times – it’s like going back to your high school years and living with parents after you have been living on your own at college for a couple of years – it has been a highlight of my experience here. I have loved getting to see how a Spanish family works – for example, the daughters call home seemingly every night and are very attached to home – along with what they eat, what they value in life, all that jazz. And plus, I get to live with frickin’ Obduli, Obduls, the Obdulinator.

(The title of this blog post, if you didn’t get the reference, is the name of a Pedro Almodóvar movie. I can’t remember if this one is good since all of his movies blend together in my mind, but it’s Almodóvar, so it’s probably good.)

We Came. We Saw. We Punted Oranges Into Their Bodies of Water. Sevilla and Cádiz

2007-12-11T12:19:00.000+01:00

Another four-day weekend, another great time in Spain. On Wednesday afternoon my friend Stan and I hopped on a 3-hour bus west to Sevilla, the fourth largest city in Spain and, like Granada, a youthful city full of students.

The first two nights we “couch-surfed” (www.couchsurfing.com) for our first time. Our hosts were Anna and Juan, a young couple with two sons, León and Linus, ages four and one. Juan is a native Sevillano, while Anna is from Italy, so their family speaks Italian in the house (little Leon speaks two languages already). During the first night spent with them, Juan and I hit it off since he is a physicist by training (but now works for Microsoft on projects unrelated to physics), while Stan and Anna chatted about their common music interests. They graciously fed us some pasta with a tomato sauce for dinner, cooked al dente in the traditional Italian way.

Sam, an expert on Sevilla since he studied here for a year, had given me a list of suggestions to do during the day and night, so on Thursday we got right to it. After a stroll through the zoo-like Parque de María Luisa, we marveled at the ceramic displays of Spanish cities in the Plaza de España and later the Tower of Gold along the Guadalquivir River. (The tower was built by the Almohades, Saharan nomads who took over Al-Andalus for a while as the Christians re-conquered the peninsula. It’s fun for me to see firsthand what I have been studying in my Islamic Culture class all semester.)

At lunchtime (2:30 p.m.) we crossed the river and went to Sam’s host family’s house to meet the family and eat lunch. What a fun time that was! Stan and I met a little over half the kids – Trinidad, Bernardo, Esperanza, Amancio, and Pepe are the ones I remember –along with the mom, Alicia, a cousin, and an American student living with them, Brian. Unfortunately, the dad, Jesús, who I’ve heard is hilarious, wasn’t there.

In the same fabled room where my mom and her siblings danced flamenco late into the night, Pepe and Amancio gave Stan some tips on playing flamenco guitar, while Bernardo and Trini eagerly asked me questions about Granada, Sam and everything else under the sun. After a delicious meal of paella and some other treats (Doritos, tuna salad and slices of mozzarella with oregano), Alicia made the prescient comment to Stan, who was copying down everyone’s name on a notepad as inspiration for writing a song, that he write music lyrics extolling the idea of family. Family is being valued less and less these days, she said; we build too many borders and forget that really we’re all one big family. There is no better proof of the importance of family than the Hermosa family.

After lunch, the three youngest kids – Trini, Bernardo and Esperanza (“Espe” for short) – acted as tour guides for us as we walked around the old Jewish quarter. We tried to go into the cathedral and Giralda but arrived ten minutes after it closed. Brian, the
American student currently living with the Hermosas, is a real party animal, so he pointed out all the good bars to us. After a pair of 1-euro, happy hour Budweiser’s in the outdoor seating of Flaherty’s pub, an old hangout spot of Sam’s overlooking the cathedral where he used to watch soccer games, Stan and I returned home by bus to our couchsurf hosts. I played around with León and Linus, while Stan played some tunes on his guitar. That night they served us rice with a curry sauce, my first curry in months, and then fell soundly asleep after watching a Lord of the Rings movie in Spanish.

On Friday we thanked Juan and Anna for their hospitality and went across town to Vincent Garrafolo’s apartment, where he graciously let us crash Friday night. After going out to lunch with Vincent and his partner, Stan and I explored the city some more. Having seen a dozen cathedrals by now, they bore us, so we darted right through the cathedral to climb the adjacent Giralda tower to get a view of the city.

Then we meandered along Calle Betis, a street along the river that’s lively at night, where we found an American bar called Long Island Bar that was a favorite of Sam’s. I was going to pose as Sam and say hello to his friend Pedro, the bartender, but it was closed when we arrived at 6 p.m.

Sevilla, though just a few hundred kilometers west, is very different from Granada. It was strange to not see mountains in the distance. It’s also more consistently warmer here; it reached as high as 71 degrees (not bad for early December!) and didn’t become cold at night like it does in Granada. The other thing that struck me were the oranges: every street was lined with orange trees. The only orange trees I can picture in Granada are inside the Alhambra. The startling abundance of oranges in Sevilla led Stan and me to spontaneously punt a couple of them into the Guadalquivir River (a feat we repeated the next day in Cádiz into the Atlantic, hence the blog post’s title).

That night we met up with some Wisconsin friends of mine who are studying here. It was fun for me to compare experiences. They took us to Tex Mex, a sports bar where I spent more time outside than in since the entrance commanded a great view of the Giralda, and afterwards a bar covered with comic strips, where I met still more Wisconsin friends.

On Saturday, feeling far removed from Granada and any thoughts of school since we had been traveling for three days and it was still only Saturday, Stan and I caught a train to Cádiz. To say that Cádiz, a dense city located on an island-like peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus, has some history is a gross understatement. Settled in 1100 B.C. by Phoenicians, the city was later controlled by Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths, Muslims and finally Christians, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in Europe. Julius Cesar lived here for a while, and Columbus’ second voyage embarked from Cádiz. The city became rich from trading with the Americas, making Cádiz cosmopolitan and liberal, which is partly why the first Spanish constitution was signed here.

Cádiz is home of the best fried fish in Spain, so that was our first errand. Following someone’s recommendation, we went to Plaza de Flores and bought a huge paper cone full of fried seafood. It was like the snow cone of Cádiz, we joked.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city’s historic center and along the beaches, snapping pictures and goofing off. Stan whipped out his guitar at several points during the day, playing as we walked along the promenade, stopping to play for random Spaniards hanging out, and jamming with a couple of random guys who were playing guitar in a park. That night we caught that last bus back to Granada (and luckily so, since the bus drivers went on strike the very next day), and so we successfully avoided having to pay for a place to sleep all weekend long.

Pictures from Cádiz

Snow-capped Sierra Nevadas

2007-12-03T13:08:00.000+01:00

Walking around the Albayzin yesterday, I took pictures of the Alhambra framed by the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains (faintly visible on the left; click on the pic to see it bigger).

¡Más Fútbol! A Granada 74 Game

2007-12-01T21:42:00.000+01:00

I had another “Salobreña moment” today. By that I mean a situation in which some generous Spaniards show us Americans a great time. (Recall the awesome beach-side party in Salobreña in which seven other girls and I got wined and dined by some locals.)

Two really fun Nebraska girls from a different study abroad program (and whom I met on the Morocco trip) had found out all the information on the Granada 74 soccer game yesterday, when they went to their practice field to buy tickets. It turns out you can’t buy tickets there, and they got a funny look when they asked the worker surrounded by Granada 74 uniforms if they could buy a jersey. “You want to buy a jersey? Why?! Do you like the colors or something?” he asked, very confused. It turns out those were the team’s actual jerseys. He ended up selling the girls two practice jerseys for six euros each that still had yellow sweat-stains on some of the white fabric. What a souvenir.

Granada 74 is a second division soccer team that plays its home games in Motril, a town on the Mediterranean an hour south of Granada. There is a free bus that takes Granada 74 fans to Motril, so Saturday afternoon we hurried to their practice field on the north side of town to catch that bus. It was full when we arrived, so these other middle-aged Spaniards waiting around told us something along the lines of “go by car.” I was about to joke “what car, yours?” when they actually offered to take us in their cars to Motril (!).

Sooner than we knew it, the four of us (me, the two Nebraska girls and a Norwegian girl in their program) were piled into the cars of random Granada 74 fans and on were on our way to Motril. It was surreal.

But actually they were not just “random fans”; they were four brothers who all once played for Granada 74, and their dad (the guy who sold my friends the practice jerseys) was the coach of Granada 74! They founded the team in 1974 and were some of the first players.

After a beautiful drive through the mountains, we found ourselves the only foreigners in a small stadium that seats six thousand fans. We paid twenty euros for “general seating” yet got to sit in the second row – so close to the action that we could see the gel in the players well-slicked hair.

Granada 74 beat Gijón (a city in the north of Spain that I visited on my week-long break) one to zero off a goal in which a Gijón player accidentally header-ed the ball into his own goal. We had fun mimicking the utterances of the other Spanish fans: for example, we Americans instinctually yell “Ohhh!” when a bail sails past the goal, but Spaniards all yell “Ooo-ee!”

A few pics from the Granada 74 soccer game

Moroccan Misery

2007-11-26T18:53:00.000+01:00

Morocco has suffered a two-year drought, I remember our tour guide telling us. I had packed accordingly for the three-day excursion to Morocco: thinking I would encounter desert-like conditions, I wore my new leather, Spanish shoes and packed lightly, throwing my rain jacket in my small bag “in case it sprinkled,” I thought to myself.

It rained the whole time we were there.

Rained, no – it poured. Of course the Moroccans around us were beaming, for this wonderfully ended their two-year drought. The constant downpour put a huge damper on our trip though: we didn’t get to ride camels as planned; my new leather shoes became wavy leather shoes; our leisurely stroll through the narrow, market streets of Tangiers on Friday became a hurried rush through flooded streets huddled under umbrellas.

The song “Umbrella” by Rihanna in fact became the theme song of the weekend. All of our tours were conducted with umbrellas over our heads (except mine since I didn’t buy an umbrella in order to save money, so I mooched off other people, jumping from one umbrella to another). It is hard to soak up the sights when you are mostly looking for puddles and rivers in the streets and opportune awnings.

Mother Nature thwarted our return trip, too. After Sunday’s lunch, we boarded a bus at 2 p.m. and expected to be home in Granada by midnight. However, “high seas” in the strait prevented any ferries from crossing, so we had to wait seven uncomfortable hours sprawled on the floor in the port. There’s not much to do in Ceuta, the Spanish-controlled city located within Morocco, so our only option was to walk a mile to a McDonald’s, where I got the “Capricho Hindu” burger, fried pork with lettuce and curry-flavored mayonnaise between a bun (unfortunately they didn’t have the McArabia burger I had seen on billboards in Morocco). Back in the crowded port, every fifteen minutes or so a team of medics would run up to the second floor, where people were fainting because of the heat caused by the dangerously dense crowd of people waiting to board the ferry.

The weekend wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. We left with some great inside jokes, such as how the excursion leader would repeatedly have to take our passports and say “no te preocupes” (“don’t worry”), which was a bit hard not to do. At night we would play drinking games (card games that normally involve drinking alcoholic drinks) without drinks since alcohol is so expensive in Muslim countries like Morocco (Islam prohibits the consumption of alcohol). So instead of drinking alcohol, we would joke that the loser would have to chug a glass of Moroccan tap water, which we were advised to avoid. My friend and I would joke, as we cautiously sipped on our nalgenes of Spanish tap water that we rationed throughout the weekend, that we were “just trying to survive.”

And who could forget the excessively officious rug seller who displayed over fifty rugs to our group and said the word “please” way too much, to the point that it got annoying and pitiful. He even inserted “please” into purely informative sentences. (“Please love this rug. This is a Berber design, please. Please look this rug. Look at this beautiful green color, please. All hand-made please. You can pay with a credit card please.”) The rest of the weekend we would jokingly insert please into random sentences. “Hey look, it’s still raining please!”

The food was great too. I especially loved the flatbread and sponge-bread at breakfast; couscous with chicken and steamed veggies for lunch; and the many flavorful clementines and teas. Shopping was stressful and uncomfortable, yet interesting, since you have to bargain: if something is worth ten, they first ask for fifty. I also was frequently followed down the street, beckoned to come back and continue bargaining, after saying “no” to obviously fake, obnoxiously overpriced goods.

It was interesting to see the medina (old quarter) of Tetuán, where artisans abound. It was like looking back in time, since people make all goods by hand rather than buying it at the local Wal-Mart or IKEA. My favorite city, however, was Chef-Chaouén, a mountain town where all the buildings are painted light blue to cool them during the summer. (Even the villagers wear matching light-blue sandals and slippers!) This was another window back in time: the public baths, where pool each has a different temperature, are still fueled by wood; donkeys laboriously carry goods up and down the city’s steep streets; and women wash clothes on washboards using water diverted by aqueducts from mountain creeks.

Late Sunday night, we finally boarded the crowded ferry around 1 a.m. (along with three or four other ferries worth of people), boarded a cramped bus at 3 a.m., and crawled into bed in Granada at 7:30 a.m. I slept soundly till noon, missing my 9:55 and 11:15 a.m. classes, and upon waking up saw images of the crowded port in Gibraltar from the previous night on TV. I had a good conversation with my señor and señora over lunch about Morocco and the weather in Andalusía and Morocco. I was glad to be back in Spain, I told them, where it rains once a month, where vendors don’t annoyingly deceive you, where I can speak the main language, and where I don’t feel like such a blatant tourist. It’s funny how Spain feels like “home” now.

Please love my pictures from Morocco.

Holiday In Spain

2007-11-26T18:26:00.000+01:00

Thanksgiving last Thursday was unlike any other. For one thing, I had to go to school that day; for another, it was the first time I spent it without family.

I did, however, get to recreate some Thanksgiving traditions. After art class that afternoon, for example, I went to a bar with some buddies and watched the Packers game. It was surreal to see American football and hear American announcers again, though it was still distinctly European, since every commercial break on our British channel, SkySports, consisted of commentary by a British guy. (I found it hard to trust the commentary of a guy with a thick British accent, since he obviously has never played the sport professionally.)

That night, our whole group – students and some teachers included – went to a restaurant outside the city by bus, where we enjoyed a huge feast of typical, American Thanksgiving food eaten on a Spanish schedule (10 p.m.) and with Spanish drinks (local wine). We were pleasantly surprised by the food overall, despite the consistency of the mashed potatoes (the same as pancake batter) and the kernels on the cobs of corn (shriveled). We all agreed that that night spent eating distinctly American food – sweet potatoes, roast turkey, cranberry sauce et al., all so comforting after months of Mediterranean food – in the company of fifty close friends and teachers made it an unforgettable Thanksgiving.

Later that night, the majority of us went to a discoteca called Vogue, a disco that plays all rock and indie music and that I’ve previously mentioned in this blog, and danced the Thanksgiving calories off until a scandalously late hour in the morning.

Funny Things I’ve Noticed About Spain

2007-11-18T17:20:00.000+01:00

Most people are already aware of the well-known peculiarities about Spanish culture, such as their late eating schedules and the legs of ham hanging everywhere, but here are a few, amusing things you may not know about Spanish, Spaniards and Spain that I have noticed over the past few months.

Applause. We Americans apparently applaud in a slow and often un-rhythmic way, to the point that we look disinterested. Spaniards, on the other hand, like to clap with a quick, spastic rhythm just like they do in flamenco performances: CLAP clap clap clap… CLAP clap clap clap… (or whatever rhythm you want). Now when we applaud after students’ presentations in class, we like to break out into various cadences of flamenco-clapping instead of our usual, lethargic, un-rhymthic, American applause.

When I don’t feel like saying “yes” in the US, I can just say “uh huh” or “mm hmm” instead. Not so in Spain: the way to say “affirmative” is just “huh” or “hmm.” This can be confusing to an American since in English just one “huh” is used to say “what?” (especially when it’s said with an upward tone, e.g., “huH?”) and “hmm” means “Wow, interesting” if it’s short or “I’m thinking…” if it’s drawn out.

The expression for weather in Spanish. In English we use the verb “to be” to express what the weather is like (for example, “it is cold today”). In Spanish, however, they use the verb “to do/make” (for example, hace frío hoy = it’s cold today). This expression originated, I recently learned, from the time when it was believed that God made the weather, so in effect what you say in Spanish is that God made it cold today.

When you walk into a room in which someone is eating a meal, you’re supposed to say “aproveche” (literally, a command that means “take advantage”), to which the person eating is supposed to respond “gracias.” I can’t think of an equivalent custom in English (“hey, I hope it’s good” – “thanks”?)

Abbreviations. In Spanish, if the thing being abbreviated is plural, that letter in the abbreviation is duplicated (e.g., EEUU for los Estados Unidos, JJOO for los Juegos Olímpicos). If we followed that rule in English, the US would be the UUSS, Mothers Against Drunk Driving would change from MADD to MMADD, etc.

Laundry. Now that we have all had our clothes washed at least once by our señoras, everybody’s clothes smell. Seriously, they reek. For instance, sitting on a bench next to a friend in the bus station one morning, he exclaimed, “What smells?” It wasn’t because I hadn’t showered that morning – I had – but rather because of the freshly washed shirt I had just put on. All of my clothing now has a peculiar funk unlike any other smell I know due to my señora’s laundry. Also, my clothes now have a crunchy feeling that I think is because she doesn’t use fabric softeners.

Diminutives. Spaniards love to use diminutives, which is probably why there are three different suffixes that make a word diminutive: -ito, -illo and -ico. For example, apple is manzana, but if you want to say little apple you can say manzanita or manzanilla or manzanica.

However diminutives are used much more widely than just to indicate small size; they are used in the same way Americans use “little,” “little bit” or “tiny bit.” For example, hace fresco = it’s chilly, hace fresquito = it’s a bit chilly.

The fun thing about diminutives in Spanish is that you can connect more than one on the end of a word to make it even more diminutive. The word chico, for example, means boy or any generic “small thing.” To make that small thing even smaller, you could add –ito and call it a chiquito. To make it smaller still, you could add the suffix –illo to get chiquitillo. I suppose you could attach all three suffixes if you want to really diminish the word, but that would be a bit overkill (overkill-ito?).

Curiously, one of my friends’ señoras uses diminutives on almost everything, even in phrases where it really doesn’t belong, such as hasta mañanita (until tomorrow), and now my friend catches himself using too many diminutives.

First Couchsurfing Experience

2007-11-13T18:09:00.001+01:00

Some of you may be familiar with the wonderful website , where travelers can find open couches or beds to crash on throughout the world. However it's more than just a free place to sleep; more importantly you get to stay in a local's house and share cultures firsthand. Sometimes they let you use their kitchen, while other times they even cook for you and feed you for free. It's a great way to travel around for cheap, get to see the local culture and make friends around the world.

When you sign up at the site, you can say that you have a couch or bed available, or if, like I, you don't have one available to offer you can say that you'd like to go out for a coffee or drink with a traveler passing through the city where you live. I met up with my first couchsurfer, Sven from Norway, on Monday. We got a tea that afternoon in the little street in the lower Albayzin where all the tea shops are located. It was fun to learn about Norway -- hiking there, why Norwegians are unpopular among Europeans and why Norway still hasn't joined the European Union.

Right now I'm contacting people on couchsurfing.com for my upcoming four-day weekend and for the beginning of my month-long travels in mid-December. Check out the site!

Arabic Baths, Martha’s Palma Friends & A Famous DJ

2007-11-10T15:29:00.000+01:00

On Friday afternoon I went with a few friends to an “aljibe,” or Arabic baths, where you relax in pools, drink tea and get a massage. I rationalized dropping twenty-four euros on such self-indulgence by telling myself that it was a “cultural experience.” After all, I’m in a medieval Moorish town where these baths used to be commonplace, so I felt like I had to do it.

There are two Arabic baths in Granada (at least that we know of): one near Plaza Nueva and the Albayzin, which is more expensive and I assume more touristy, and the one we went to, which is outside of the old part of town and near the university. It has seven hot pools and one cold one, and you’re supposed to alternate hot pool, cold pool, hot pool, cold pool, etc. In the tradition of Arabic baths of centuries ago, the pools are kept at different temperatures, which was quite a technological triumph in its day.

The tea that we were served was the best I had ever drank in my life (the Spanish name of the tea is “moruno”). For the massage, I elected for “pine” oil and a back massage instead of a leg one, since I can easily massage my legs myself but can’t quite massage my back.

Soft, soothing music plays in the background, the lights are dim, and the sounds of splashing water fill the room, a common theme of Moorish buildings. It was fun that the five of us had the whole place to ourselves. As we left at 5:30 pm, a dozen people probably just coming off work were entering.

That evening I finally met some of Martha’s friends from La Palma. I had planned to meet her two best friends, Ricardo and Fátima, in the center of the city, but only Fátima showed up since Ricardo was still taking a test. We went to Ricardo’s apartment, where I met three other Palma guys (Ricardo’s roommates). I got to chat with them for a while in their apartment, and soon Ricardo came back exhausted from his chemistry exam. I had a really hard time understanding all of them, however, because of their Palma accent, to the point that I felt as I did when I came here. I turns out I had to leave to meet up with friends for sushi (finally something different from Mediterranean food) while they left for the cafeteria for dinner, so we planned to meet up again sometime.

After sushi we went to a club called “Planta Baja” where all bands and DJ’s from Granada have gotten their start; that is, if you’re going to play live music in Granada, this is the place to play. We met up with one of our teachers, who happens to know the guy DJ-ing that night. It turns out he is sort of a celebrity: he’s a band member of Los Planetas – the most popular indie band in Spain – so it was cool to talk to him at a bar outside the club and then watch him spin electronica beats with hypnotic, ever-changing videos in the background.

Music & Granada

2007-11-08T12:33:00.000+01:00

There are a couple of new albums, one in particular, that I've been listening over and over in Granada, to the point that now whenever I hear them I instantly think of my experiences here in Granada and around Andalusía. I have always been fascinated how music becomes intimately tied to experience in a way that listening to that music always recalls those experiences. These albums make me think of listening to music on a bus winding through the Sierra Nevadas; of the taste of salt in the air in towns along the Mediterranean; of eating bocadillos of avocado and jamón serrano with friends on the rooftop of a hostel overlooking Nerja, the Mediterranean and the mountains; of the smells of olives and fish in my apartment; of chilly walks in the morning on narrow, cobblestone streets to school.

The album most associated with Granada for me is Spoon's wonderfully rhythmic "Ga Ga Ga Ga" (2007), especially tracks 1, 3 and 7. The beats are irresistible to tap along with, which always remind me of the joy of living here. Also, Spoon's music makes me think of an oasis in the middle of the desert, for the band is from Austin, TX, which I imagine as a green, student-filled, liberal oasis amidst a dry, Texan landscape in the same way that Granada is an refuge of water and youthful energy amidst a dry, Andalusían landscape. Thousands of students come from all over Andalusía to Granada for the fiesta and school, just how imagine students do in Texas.

Spoon – The Underdog (track 7)

Other new albums that make me think of Granada which I highly recommend: New Pornographers' "Challengers," Okkervil River's "The Stage Names," Radiohead's "In Rainbows," Bishop Allen's "The Broken String" and Vampire Weekend's self-titled album.

Every once in a while in my oral Spanish class we learn the lyrics to a Spanish pop song and try singing it together. It's a good way of learning to speak as quickly as they sing, to learn new vocabulary and get to know Spanish culture. For example, "Besos" by El Canto del Loco in their album Zapatillas questions why Spaniards care for their appearances so much.

For running, my favorite new song is "Your English Is Good" by the Tokyo Police Club, an upbeat song whose theme is appropriate given how I am slowly improving my Spanish. I was honored a couple of days ago to hear my señora tell her daughter, who has come to visit for a week, "¡Nota que bien habla Carlos!" (Notice how well Carlos speaks Spanish!).

Tokyo Police Club – Your English

Other individual songs I recommend and which remind me of my experiences here in some way:

Editors – Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors (Full), by a British band, makes me think of talking music and pop culture with Alan Walker in London.
"Relax (Take It Easy)" by Mika, makes me think of watching basketball and soccer with my señor, Luis, since this song is played in the frequent San Miguel beer commercials.
"Umbrella" by Rihanna and Jay-Z, a song that gets in your head and that is played in seemingly every music-bar and discoteca in Granada. Spaniards are in love with this song right now.
Maps – To The Sky (Edit), a smooth, reflective song I often like to listen to on late nights walking home.
"Boy With A Coin" by Iron & Wine, a chill song with a pleasing, clapping beat that reminds me of walking around the narrow streets of Granada.

Anyway I hope this gives you a little idea of the confluence of music and my experiences in Granada and maybe that you find a few new favorite songs.

Long Weekend In Madrid, Day 3: Tombs of Spanish Kings, Learning to Eat Prawns and Crabs, and A Futbol Game

2007-11-05T17:24:00.000+01:00

On Sunday morning Julio Jr. and Julio Sr. once again graciously took me on a trip to a site outside Madrid, this time to the royal palace called El Escorial. Located in a semi-forested, mountainous area thirty miles northwest of Madrid, El Escorial is a unique building with Baroque elements. King Philip II ordained its construction to both commemorate the recent Spanish victory over King Henry II of France in 1557 and to provide a place to bury his parents, Carlos V and Isabella of Portugal. The past five centuries of Spanish kings (with the exception of three) are buried here. However, there is no space for the current king, Juan Carlos I, and it remains to be seen where he will be buried.

The highlight for me, and indeed the main attraction of the palace, was the burial room of all the kings. You descend a stairway into a small, dome-shaped room with a spectacularly ornate, Baroque ceiling that contrasts with the simplicity of the rest of the palace. Set into the walls around the room are black-marble and gold-decorated coffins of the kings and queens, each with their names inscribed in Latin.

There is a pleasing symmetry to their arrangement: each king on the left side is balanced by the corresponding queen directly opposite on the right side. Even though the kings often had multiple wives, the one buried here is the one who bore the next heir to the throne. However, there are some interesting exceptions to the symmetry: in at least one case the queen was on the left side and the king on the right because the queen was the one who inherited the throne.

Elsewhere in the palace, our guide (whom despite his Portuguese accent I was able to understand almost completely) showed us coffins of other royalty – including elaborate marble coffins for infants who died young – and other curious remnants from centuries ago, such as chairs, sun dials, princess’ beds along with the bed-warming devices, and even the death-bed of King Philip II, positioned exactly as it was when he died, from where the king could see the church's altar through the window as he took his last breaths.

For lunch, Julio’s family took me to a Spanish restaurant to show me yet more typical Spanish food: little fried squids, octopus (even better here than the one I tried in Santiago), and a paella rich with shrimps, prawns and – a new ingredient to me – crab! They taught me the best way to peel shrimps and prawns (pop off the head and the legs, then peel of sections of the shell using your finger nail on one side, not both) and crabs (squeeze the legs, break the pincers with a walnut-cracker, pry open the body with your fingers, and suck out the meat). I had a lot of fun with the seafood. For dessert we shared a sample platter and sipped coffee and shots of herb-derived liquor. Yum!

The whirlwind weekend continued that afternoon as Julio took me to see a futbol game between Atlético Madrid and Villareal (a team from Valencia), an important game since it pitted against each other the 5th and 3rd place teams in the first division, respectively. The ambience of the crowded trains, subways and streets on the way to the stadium, where everyone was wearing Atlético’s red and blue colors, reminded me of going to Red Sox games at Fenway Park.

Our seats at the forty-yard line in the first row (!) offered an unbeatable view of the action. The opposing team ended up winning 4-3 with a goal in the final minute, though I counted myself lucky to see seven goals scored, an unusually high number for a typical, Spanish soccer game.

The crowd was interesting, too. One end-zone of the crowd played the role of Wisconsin’s student section, standing the entire game, singing songs and drumming a beat with their claps to the action on the field.

I have never heard so many swears in my life: after every call by the referees, seemingly one out of every four people in the stadium proceeded to screamed obscenities at the refs. It surprised me to hear the selection of swears (¡Coño! ¡Hijo de puta! ¡Gillipollas!) that were shouted with utter disregard toward the little, four-year old kids dawdling around.

Pictures from El Escorial, Futbol Game

Long Weekend In Madrid, Day 2: A Castle, A Roasted Baby Pig and Franco’s Tomb

2007-11-03T20:13:00.001+01:00

When you think of Spain, you probably think of Castile, the province in the center of the country where Cervantes’ Don Quixote roamed the yellow countryside and where peasants toiled away for nobles and kings who lived in Middle Ages castles. I got to see such a classic scene on Saturday in Segovia, where the two Julios gave me a grand tour of the Alcázar (the castle-palace), the cathedral, typical food in Segovia and the Roman aqueduct.

It was really fun to see the alcázar with its black-slate roofs; its yellow-stone walls speckled with curious black rocks; the dry, yellow, Castilian countryside in the background; the Spanish kings’ luxurious living quarters. It seemed like a castle out of a fairy tale, with pointy towers, a moat and all. If only it still had its drawbridge…

After touring the castle we strolled across town to the huge, gothic cathedral. By now I feel I’ve visited a bunch of Gothic cathedrals and churches; while they all seem very similar, they are always fun to walk around just to feel so tiny inside the magnificently tall structure – exactly the sensation Gothic architects wanted to instill.

Next to the cathedral is Segovia’s plaza mayor, which Julio Sr. told me is a good example of the model Spanish city: a plaza mayor surrounded by four essential elements: a cathedral, a government building, a theatre and some restaurants with tables on the terrace.

Our final sight in Segovia was the impressive Roman aqueduct, an architectural marvel built in the first and second centuries B.C. that brings water to the city’s wall from the Río Frío (Cold River), some eighteen kilometers away. The last kilometer is elevated, reaching a maximum height of 28 m. (100 ft.) in the Plaza Azoguejo. I was amazed by how the Romans piled together crudely cut, granite blocks without mortar or clamps, yet the structure continues to this day.

It was in this majestic setting where I ate what will probably go down as one of the top five meals of my life. In this Plaza Azoguejo, not twenty meters from the aqueduct, lies the 200-year old restaurant called Mesón de Cándido, a place so popular we had to reserve a table a day earlier. The restaurant is full of character: the walls are covered with artifacts, paintings and photographs of famous people (Spanish royalty, actresses, etc.) who have dined there.

After sharing plates of chorizo, served freshly sizzling off the pan, and some sort of mushroom stew, we had Segovia’s most famous, local dish: roasted suckling pig (i.e., baby pig; known in Spanish as Cochinillo Asado de Segovia). The waiter brings out the entire roasted baby pig, chops it into three pieces and dishes them out. The most salient characteristic is the moistness, making it far different from the dry roasted pig you might eat for Christmas. For dessert we had another specialty of Segovia: “punch.” It has nothing to do with the red, alcoholic drink, but rather it’s a sponge cake bathed and coated in marzipan, a confection consisting of sugar and ground almonds. It was so rich at first I thought it was some kind of cheesecake.

On the way back to Madrid, we stopped at the Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), a memorial to those who died in the Spanish Civil War. Located in a forest so dense and green it looks like Bavaria, the monument isn’t really located in a valley but instead is perched on a hill. The first thing you notice is an absolutely gigantic cross made of stone that we saw from the freeway earlier. The cross is so tall that it dwarfs the tall Basilica underneath it. Spain sure loves its crosses.

The “really freaking huge” theme continues inside the Basilica, carved into the hillside. The massive, cross-shaped corridor is lined with colossal figures – angels, hooded monks, etc. At either end of the short part of the cross are two doorways to the burials to the fallen soldiers (which apparently only the families of the buried can enter) and in the center of the cross is a fairly nondescript stone where Franco is buried. It was interesting to ask the two Julio’s about the Civil War and Franco. I learned, for example, that Julio’s great-grandfather, a farmer in Galicia, was once hassled in his home by the police during the Civil War, even though he was far removed from the war and supported neither side.

Saturday night Julio and I met up a friend of Julio’s and watched the Sevilla – Real Madrid futbol game in an Irish pub (curiously there’s more Irish pubs than Spanish bars in Majadahonda). It was fun to learn futbol terminology in Spanish, the Liga (League) and other aspects of Spanish futbol. I am starting to appreciate spectating soccer more – it’s a beautiful sport to watch – and can’t wait to see the Atlético Madrid – Villareal game tomorrow.

Pictures from Segovia, Valley of the Fallen

Long Weekend In Madrid, Day 1: The Prado and A Comedian

2007-11-03T18:01:00.000+01:00

Friday morning Julio and I took buses and metros into the center of the city to see the Prado. Since the brand new edition to the museum opened a couple of days ago, entrance to the museum is free this weekend. As with anything free in Spain, tons of people came. As a result, we waited an hour and a half in a line that practically wrapped around the museum. We probably spent more time waiting to enter the museum than in the museum itself.

The new edition to the Prado contains art from the 19th century that was acquired from some other museum. This art was a breath of fresh air for me: the rest of the museum (part of which we accidentally walked around mistakenly thinking it was the new part) seems to consist of a lot of religious art – how many times do you have to paint Jesus? – but the 19th century art depicts real, historical events and beautiful landscapes. It was cool to see the most famous works of Joaquin Sorolla, on whom I have to give a presentation in my art class at the end of November. My other favorites from the new edition were the room full of satirical, amusing sketches of Francisco de Goya and a painting of an execution called “El Fusilamiento de Torrijos y Sus Compañeros en las Playas de Málaga,” powerful because of the faces of the men waiting to be executed.

Before catching a train back to Julio’s town, Majadahonda, we stopped in the memorial to the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings, located in the big train station not far from the Prado. The memorial is a big, blue room sealed off from the rest of the station so that it is quiet. In the center of the room there is a large, plastic dome in the ceiling that is covered with comments written by people on the internet in various languages that give support to the families, vow to never surrender to the terrorists, etc.

Back home we had lunch, another meal of Galician food (Julio Sr. and Esperanza are from Galicia): hake and potatoes along with bread and Galician cheese. Last night we had white tuna from the north of Spain. It’s fun to try all the Galician food I missed out on because I almost always ate supermarket meals when I was in Santiago.

Friday night Julio, two of his friends and I went to see a comedian from Madrid who performed in a bar in the town’s mall. His jokes consisted of just two themes: potty humor (types of and ways to poop, slang names for genitalia, and other unimaginative jokes that anyone could find on the internet) and regional differences in Spain (he’s Catalan and joked about Catalans, Basques, Andaluces, etc.). I found the jokes about Spain and its regional differences interesting. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, the comedian spoke very rapidly, and I’m not as used to the Madrid accent, so it was hard for me to grasp all the jokes.

A few pictures from the Prado and 11-M memorial

Halloween In Spain

2007-11-01T22:02:00.000+01:00

Halloween, an American holiday, is growing in popularity here in Spain. Some kids dress up and go trick-or-treat-ing, and a small fraction of young people wear costumes when they go out to bars and the discotecas on the night of the 31st. Usually Wednesdays aren’t terribly crazy, but this one was special because tomorrow is a national holiday (so almost everyone gets a four day weekend, including me) and it was Halloween night.

I didn’t have the time or willingness to spend much money on a costume. Fortunately a friend bought a “party pack” of fake mustaches in one of the many cheap, Chinese stores around Granada. I wore the blonde one, which people said looked eerily real. We went to a few tapas bars and then a bar with one euro Estrella Especial beers with practically our entire group, which was a lot of fun. Afterwards we went to a discoteca near the university that surprisingly played all American and British rock – surprising because most discotecas play beats, not guitar riffs, such as hip hop, reggaeton and techno.

After a five-hour bus ride I am now in Madrid visiting Julio and his family for the long weekend. We’ve got a full weekend planned: the Prado Museum (which has a brand new edition inaugurated yesterday), Segovia (an old city with castles/cathedrals just outside Madrid), El Escorial (royal palace where the past five centuries of Spanish kings have been buried), and perhaps best of all: a futbol game on Sunday between 2 top Spanish teams.

Run Above the Alhambra

2007-10-30T17:13:00.000+01:00

I went for a run yesterday and brought my camera along. I went higher up the mountain above the Alhambra than I've ever gone, explored the park up there, and got my first views of the Sierra Nevadas with snow on their peaks.

Check out the pictures here: http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt/100279

Surf-town San Sebastian

2007-10-27T18:02:00.000+02:00

San Sebastian is a funny place. On one hand, it’s got the best tapas in Spain – indeed I almost cried in taste-bud-joy when I ate my 2-euro truffles and calamari in its own ink – and it’s famous for its trend-setting cooks. On the other hand, it’s a surf town straight out of California; the two guys from California I’m traveling with said the part of town near the surfing beach reminded them of a cold Santa Monica, since there’s lots of surf shops, skateboarders and that unique California/Hawaii surfer style.

As we walked down the dark, streetlight-lit boardwalk along the surfer beach on Friday night (there’s another, longer beach that has no waves), we were amazed to see people still surfing despite the sun having set. Though it’s late October, the water is still warm enough to surf if you were a full wetsuit. I also saw short, cut-off fins that are made just for boogie boarding, so that you can paddle out against the waves more easily.

At the end of the beach we joined a pickup game of soccer with some Spaniards and other European students who were studying in San Sebastian, which was a lot of fun – and the first soccer I’ve played here. Needless to say I was terrible compared to the Europeans, but at one point I somehow pulled off a miraculous spin move with the ball that shook a European defender, which brought some “Oooh’s” and laughs from the other Europeans.

We stayed in a great youth hostel in the center of the city, our first youth hostel of the trip since every other one seemed to be on the outskirts of the city. It’s run by a lady whose kids live out of the house and who has converted her apartment into a colorful, fun hostel. The only other guy staying in the hostel was a 26 year-old from Chile who was on his last night of his 14 month trip around Australia, Asia and Europe, and who, as you might imagine, had some interesting stories. (I really want to go to Thailand now, for he did not stop raving about it.)

Since we five and Andres from Chile were going out, the guy helping to run the hostel went out with us and gave us a bar tour. In total we went to about seven or eight bars in the old quarter. At first we went to a few typical foreigner hangouts, where I met some Australians and Basques, but then he took us to an authentic Basque bar, which was quite an experience: the music was heavy and the people in there were almost all Basque guys. I talked for a while with a Moroccan guy my age who was studying and working just outside San Sebastian; he had to work at 9 a.m. the next day (a Saturday) in which he does something related to fixing lights.

Some of the young guys we met in the Basque bar continued our bar crawl with us. One exclaimed to me that, “we are not in Spain nor in France; we are in the País Vasco!” One of my friends pressed one of the Basque guys on why they want Basque prisoners to be relocated to prisons in the Basque country rather than be dispersed around the country (we have seen lots of posters and signs demanding this). His answer was that he could never drive down to visit an inmate in, say, Andalusia because it would be too dangerous for him to be down there. This is absurd; two of the teachers in my school are from the Basque country. It seems to me that a lot of this Basque nationalism is not so much logical but rather outpouring of pride.

The next day I climbed up the hill on the peninsula that overlooks the city and explored the 16th century castle on top. After that I went back to the surfer beach and watched the surfers for an hour. I’d love to try this someday in California or Hawaii (or Thailand).

Pictures from San Sebastian

American Art, Pinxtos, E.T.A. Bars and Bicycles in Bilbao

2007-10-26T18:26:00.000+02:00

Bilbao has its act together. We got our first example of this in one of its many tourist offices, which is our first destination whenever we arrive in a new city, since we pick up city maps and a list of hostels and their prices. This was our first glimpse into the “new Bilbao”: immediately we were bombarded with pamphlets on art, music and nightlife; maps of both Bilbao and our next destination, San Sebastian; pamphlets on hostels and other tourist information in the rest of the Basque country. They marked on our maps where hostels are, where the nightlife is, even where the Euskatren will drop us off in San Sebastian. In short, it was the most helpful and best-organized tourist office I’ve ever been in, and it was a preview of other great things Bilbao has done to foster tourism.

That first night I went out with a buddy for “pinxtos” (in Spanish: “pinchos”), the Basque word for “tapas,” which are like tapas but are much better and you have to pay for them. It’s a great way to sample tons of different foods for relatively cheap. They usually consist of some sort of seafood, piece of omelette, meat, and/or veggie on a piece of bread, and many are arranged in a gourmet way to look absolutely gorgeous. You order a drink and either one pinxto or, if you want to try a couple of pinxtos, you ask for a plate and pick out whichever ones you want at your leisure and tell the bartender at the end how many you ate. I hopped from pinxto bar to pinxto bar around Plaza Nueva, a lively square full of pinxto bars.

On Thursday morning we went to the Ribera Market, the largest indoor market in Europe, and watched as butchers skinned rabbits or struggled to cut apart pig carcasses. Then we walked along the river to the Guggenheim, the most stunning building I have ever seen. The current exhibit is “American Art,” which I was not too excited about when I heard about it, but it turns out I really enjoyed it. The works spanned from portraits of George Washington through Andy Warhol’s colorful “Marilyn Monroe” faces to works completed in the last couple of years. My three favorite pieces were a beautiful, idealistic painting of the Sierra Nevada mountains from the age of Manifest Destiny, a drip painting of Jackson Pollock and a modern piece consisting of silhouettes of slaves and slave-owners made using classroom-style overhead projectors (your silhouette invariably appears in the work as you stand in front of the projectors, implicating your compliance in the atrocity of slavery).

After wandering around the Guggenheim for hours (I gawked more at the building itself than the artwork within), we ate a supermarket meal in a brand-new shopping mall nearby. Then we embarked on the next adventure that distinguishes Bilbao as an awesome city to visit: biking.

You can rent bikes at many locations throughout the city – for free! You can pick up a bike and drop it off at any location you wish. All you have to do is fill out a form and let them photocopy your passport. All five of us guys rented bikes and cruised down the main artery of the city, weaving around buses and taxis and zipping past expensive clothing shops, and then we cut through a park toward the Guggenheim.

Next to the Guggenheim we found a playground that was by far the most fun playground I’ve ever been to. It has elaborate structures of webs of rope to climb around; bouncy, spherical balls to hop between like parkour; and, most fun of all, various forms of merry-go-rounds, or more generally, things that spin. For example, there was this yellow, tilted bucket seat, which we called the “butt saucer,” which is incredibly fun to sit in and spin around while pumping your legs to keep your speed. There’s a simple post with a ring on top with three handles that spins around; three guys can run, jump and swing around nearly horizontal to the ground. We probably spent an hour in this playground, only later discovering a sign that says “Ages 6 to 12 only.” “Good thing my 13th birthday is tomorrow,” we said.

That night, I ate a dinner that was part supermarket, part pinxto. Again I went to Plaza Nueva – it was just such a great place – but this time I got a really unique pinxto: rabo de toro (bull’s tail). I was hoping to get the hairy tail and all, but instead I got a fancy looking plate of beef, bread and a little bit of melon. The beef from the tail was like regular beef but exquisite. The bartender explained to me that they cook the meat from the tail for six hours in order to soften it, since it starts out very hard.

After the bull’s tail pinxto I went with a buddy to find an E.T.A. bar that one of our teachers in Granada had recommended. (E.T.A. is the Basque “terrorist” organization that wants the Basque province to be an independent country.) We found the bar, located not far from our hostel in the old quarter, and ordered a drink. It was full of Basques, and it was clear we were the only foreigners. On the walls were pictures of young Basques with their first names written underneath, whom I figured were E.T.A. martyrs or at the very least attackers. There were also posters for upcoming protests and messages demanding independence and freedom written on the walls. I didn’t take a picture of the bar because I wasn’t sure if that would go over well with the Basques in there.

We left this bar and went to another one south of the river that someone had recommended the night before, and this, too, was an E.T.A. hangout, decorated with similar portraits of young Basques, both male and female, on the walls and a poster that read “SMASH CAPITALISM.” Since the Basque language is not at all related to the family of Indo-European languages, I had almost no idea what any of the other messages said, unless it contained a very modern word that obviously wasn’t used by Basques a millennium ago (such as “institute” or “capitalism”). I wondered as I stood at the bar if any E.T.A. attacks had been planned in this very bar.

We stopped at a third and final bar that we stumbled upon back in the old quarter, where scores of young Basques had spilled out of the small bar and were sipping drinks on the streets. This was decidedly different from the image you get of Bilbao on the river walkway and near the Guggenheim: this was all Basques, no frills, no tourists, cheap beers, the smell of marijuana in the air, graffiti on the walls. I had read in the New York Times travel section an article detailing this exact experience: the writer witnessed the dichotomy of the city between the new, flowery developments near the Guggenheim and the graffiti-covered, former industrial town feel of the rest of Bilbao. I even remember the author recounting a conversation he had in a bar much like I was in with young Basques, who answered the author’s questions between puffs of marijuana.

It has been very interesting for me to see what the Basque people are like, and they are very distinct compared to Andalusians. The Basques in general are closed and cold – a Basque lady even admitted it to me. Not one of the young Basques in the three bars we went to on Thursday night approached me and my friend, was curious where we were from or wanted to practice their English – all exactly opposite of typical Andalusian youth, who are much more open and likely to approach you.

The Basque country is relatively rich compared to the rest of the country (save for Cataluña) because of all the industry there and because Franco let their industry continue throughout his reign. As a result of their relative wealth, Basques pay high taxes to the government in Madrid, and so they would much rather be independent, but Spain cannot afford to lose their most prosperous section of the country, so Madrid will never let the Basque country (or Cataluña) be independent. I observed this relative wealth in the prevalence of expensive clothing stores and nice cars. However, I wonder how the Basque country is doing now as China’s industry is surging and manufacturing jobs are moving away from first world countries.

The young Basques have a peculiarly homogenized appearance and dress: they all seem to have brown hair, and many dress in a sort of down-to-earth way – green and brown tones, sometimes hiking boots, etc. I guess another reason I liked Bilbao so much is that the girls there are so darn cute.

Pictures from Bilbao

Picos de Europa

2007-10-26T18:21:00.000+02:00

On Wednesday we drove from Gijón to Bilbao through the Picos de Europa, a beautiful mountain range straddling the provinces of Asturias and Cantabria. We drove through some really windy, yet thankfully well-paved roads up, down and around the green mountains, stopping at a couple of lookout points on the way. Then we spontaneously drove up some mountain road looking for a “furnicular,” a tram-like train that brings you up to the top of a mountain. It turns out it was 17 euros and wouldn’t leave for another hour, so we decided to just hike along the river and soak up the views of the beautiful, green-covered, granite peaks. I’d love to come back someday and hike these peaks or do what’s a common activity in the Picos: take a canoe down one of the many rivers.

Pictures from the Picos de Europa

Pictures from Oviedo & Gijón

2007-10-24T21:12:00.002+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt/100241

Cruising Around Asturias: Oviedo & Gijón

2007-10-24T21:12:00.001+02:00

On Tuesday we awoke in Luarca to our first northern-Spain rain, which lived up to the descriptions of every Spaniard that tells you about the rain in the north: it is very fine, almost a mist, and you barely realize that you are getting wet.

Once again I took the morning driving shift and took us through wet, green mountains along the Atlantic coast to Oviedo, the largest city in the province of Asturias. We finally hit sections of freeways in which the speed limit is 120 kilometers per hour, where I was able to test the speed of our Citroen C4.

Oviedo was largely destroyed in the Civil War and has since been rebuilt, but part of the old town remains. The modern part of the city is hip and colorful, while (what remains of the) old part is all made of the same sandstone, giving the area a warm, yellow feel. We all liked the atmosphere in Oviedo, even though it rained lightly the entire time.

Next we went to Oviedo’s greatest tourist attraction: three pre-Romanesque churches that were built in the ninth century (!). These were built by Christians when they had just begun the (re)conquest of the Iberian peninsula. The Moors were able to conquer almost all of Spain; the only region they could not conquer was this small, mountain-locked province, Asturias.

We walked to one of the churches, which lies not far outside the old part of town, but found it closed. We drove to the other two, which are three kilometers away from the city center and high up on a hill. These, too, were closed, but their exteriors were nonetheless fascinating to see, and they were located in a beautiful, forested, green, mist-covered mountainside. The decoration of the columns was unlike anything we had ever seen. It was cool to think of the first Christian Spaniards living in these green mountains and building these little churches, which continue to stand to this day – 1,200 years later.

Next we drove to Gijón, a modern port city known for its vibrant nightlife – except when it’s raining, as it continued to do throughout that day and night. (Gijón is fun to pronounce: the “gi” in Spanish is pronounced like “hee,” so Gijón is pronounced “hee-HOHN!” It’s even more fun when you add a little guttural “hkk” when you pronounce your “gi” and “j” sounds, as I’ve heard many Granadinos do. “hkkee-HKKOOHN!”)

We had unfortunate timing when we tried to look for a cheap restaurant serving Asturian food at 5:30 p.m. – we hadn’t eaten since breakfast – but, being Spain, everywhere was closed until 6:30 p.m. or later, so we ate a supermarket meal, instead. Later that night we walked to a city block that, according to our guidebook, has all the nightlife, but being October every single bar was either closed or completely empty. Fortunately we had spotted a good “cervezería” earlier, where we sampled some European beers and called it a night.

Pictures from Lugo and Luarca

2007-10-23T20:49:00.001+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100229

Last Night in Santiago, Beginning of the ¡Road Trip!

2007-10-23T20:28:00.000+02:00

To keep costs low we have been eating mostly meals from supermarkets – often consisting of 50-cent baguettes, some sort of Spanish ham and/or cheese and a 1-euro bottle of wine – but on our last night in Santiago we decided to splurge on some real Gallego food. We split a ration of “pulpo a la gallego” (Galician octopus), a specialty of Galicia. The disks of octopus arms came in a dish of olive oil and powdered with some sort of red pepper (cayenne maybe?), and they had a delicious taste and a funny texture unique only to octopi. I also tried “caldo gallego,” another specialty of Galicia, which is a broth-based soup of potatoes and cabbage – Galicia’s comfort food. Another highlight of the meal was “zorza,” midly hot slices of beef that reminded us of Mexican food. (Of all the things we Americans miss, Mexican food tops the list, followed closely by fabric softeners, big breakfasts and smiles on the streets.)

Early the next morning we picked up our Citroen C4 rental car, which has barely enough room for all of our bags and five guys. Fortunately one of us is 21, the minimum age to rent a car at this company (at others, such as Hertz, it’s higher). I elected to drive first (only two of us can drive stick), and soon enough we were out of Santiago and zooming through the Gallego countryside.

Driving in Spain is a fun experience. Thankfully one of us printed out a sheet from the internet explaining the road signs, most of which are graphical and not textual, yet they’re still difficult to understand. The maximum and minimum speeds change very quickly: one moment it’s 80 on a straightaway, the next it’s 50 on a turn, then 80 again, then suddenly you’re in a roundabout, right in the middle of a highway. Galicia (though not the bordering province, Asturias) has these annoying, utterly unnecessary curved arrows in the dotted line along the middle of the road that remind you, in addition to the dotted line itself, that indeed you can pass cars here.

The countryside was gorgeous: in some parts it reminded me of rural Wisconsin, especially near Madison and the farms in the hilly, western part of the state, while other forested, mountainous areas looked as if we were in Bavaria. All the while we flipped through the Spanish radio, which we complained talked too much – even in the middle of songs! – yet was surprisingly eclectic.

A couple of hours later we arrived in Lugo, the only city in Spain that still has a complete Roman wall that encircles its city. We walked around half of the wall, which was built in the 2nd century, and cut through the city’s center back to our car. Unfortunately, unsightly urban development has obscured the view of the countryside from the top of the wall.

Next Graham took over driving and brought us through the curvy, mountain roads to Ribadeo, where we caught our first view of the Atlantic. We stopped to buy food in a supermarket and looked for the beach called Playa de los Campos. We had already passed it, so we turned left at a sign that reads “CAMPOS” onto a dirt road. It turns out that spontaneous decision was a good one: we soon parked our car in some open grass and hiked down to some huge rocks overlooking the coast. It was a spectacular, isolated place for a picnic. There was no one else nearby for miles, and certainly no guide book would know of this gem of a spot. The coastline looked like that of Ireland, or at least how I would imagine Ireland’s coast would be. This little adventure to the coast was a little slice of heaven, and plus we got our one off-road experience of the trip out of the way.

Next we stopped in a quaint, charming little seaside town called Luarca. When we booked our 14-euro-a-person hostel (the cheapest in town), a British lady shouted from her balcony, “Don’t stay here!” After we booked it, she told us as she passed us in the hallway, “I told you not to stay here!” Plus, the hostel was “rustic” and the elderly owner was senile – she had no idea why I would give her a twenty-dollar bill and four euros in coins when the room only cost fourteen euros. We were thoroughly spooked.

Anyway it turns out the British lady was only joking. That’s a good joke to play on fellow tourists at the cheapest hostel in town.

That night we walked around town looking for the marcha (nightlife) but found very little. It turns out, we found out from a bartender, Luarca is crazy during the summer months, June to September, but is utterly dead starting in October. Great! The only people we saw in the bars – if there was anyone in the bars – were elderly.

That didn’t stop us from trying “sidra” (cider) at a bar full of elderly. This Asturian tradition is poured from shoulder height into a glass in order to create foam and bubbles. We ordered a bottle of “natural cider” and watched as the bartender poured four glasses from shoulder height, perfectly landing the spout of cider into the glasses. It tasted a lot like wine, only apple flavored; it was very different (worse, I thought) compared to the sidra I had in Santiago last night, which was carbonated and reminiscent of a beer. I think this one tasted more like apple-flavored wine because it was a “natural” sidra. Anyway, there is a wooden bucket in the bar for you to pour your sidra from shoulder height into your glass, which I tried to do, but I missed terribly at first.

Pictures from Santiago

2007-10-23T20:24:00.000+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100221

Santiago Compostela

2007-10-21T18:56:00.002+02:00

After taking two tests and handing in an essay on Thursday, my ten-day, mid-semester vacation finally began. Late that night, I and four other guys – Chris from UIC, Art from U of I, and two brothers from California, Graham and Clifton – boarded a 12:30 am bus to Madrid. After catching a few hours of sleep on the bus and another few in the airport, we took a cheap flight on Spanair to Santiago Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain.

Santiago is famous for being the destination of peregrinos (pilgrims) who since the Middle Ages have trekked across Europe to arrive at Santiago’s famous cathedral. Even today hundreds of people complete the journey; I saw many hikers around the city. There are cheap, hostel-like places where pilgrims can stay along the route, but you have to have a booklet that you get stamped that proves you are a pilgrim.

Galicia has its own language – Gallego – that is spoken by 85% of the population. A mix of Castilian Spanish and Portuguese (and just as old as they are), Gallego is an actual language, not just a dialect, that is studied in its universities and is used on the majority of street signs. The most obvious characteristic is the prevalence of x’s, which seem to replace j’s and g’s in Castilian and is supposed to be pronounced like a soft “sh.” Some of the other changes to Castilian are kind of fun: la is a, el is o, de la is da, del is do, plaza is praza.

The first thing we noticed as our plane descended onto Santiago is the same thing everyone remarks about the north of Spain: It’s so green! This is Spain?!

As we walked toward the center of the city, we did what would recur many times in Santiago: wander freely into a fantastically old church, marveling at the old artwork and applying our new art knowledge by guessing to which era the building belonged.

The unity of the center of the city is something to behold: it’s all pedestrian (except for taxis) and made of granite colonnades and mossy façades. It feels like being transported back in time. Around every corner, it seems, lies another church, some big and daunting – the cathedral is the mother of them all – others small and unique. On the first day alone, we wandered into half a dozen different churches.

“Wandering” was the word of the day for day one of three in Santiago. We wandered into two free museums: one about the pilgrimage and another about contemporary art. We wandered into two “paradores,” which are historic sites that have been converted into hotels. The first was the Royal Hospital built by the Reyes Católicos (i.e., Ferdinand and Isabel) that housed pilgrims. We walked in acting as if we were potential clients and tried to see as much of the building before being kicked out. The price: 250 euros for a double bed. Yikes. The second parador was the oldest convent in all of Spain. Fortunately we didn’t get kicked out of this one, so we were able to see the Renaissance patios and glass floors showing the old foundations.

Friday night we wandered around the modern part of town where the University of Santiago students hang out. Here I sampled a Belgian beer (there is a lot more French and Belgian influence here compared to in Granada) and Galicia’s main beer, Estrella Galicia, and quickly went to sleep in our 15 euro hostel, the cheapest we could find in the old part of town.

On Saturday we went to Santiago’s daily market, which is held in a grand old arcaded market hall, where we marveled at the plentiful, varied seafood – some of the prawns and crabs were still alive amongst their dead brothers – tried slices of acorn-fed beef (delish) and bought some of the best apples I’ve ever eaten. I tried to ask an old lady for a couple of apples, but she quickly and forcefully filled up a plastic bag of a dozen apples for just a euro. These green wonders explode with flavor in your mouth. Finally, after always eating mushy, Golden Delicious apples in Granada, a good apple!

Next we continued our hot streak of free museums and churches. My favorite museum was the anthropological Museo de Pobo Galego, which portrayed all aspects of life in Galicia, from ship-building and seafood catching (Galicia has some of the best seafood in Europe due to its fjord-like rías in the west) to straw baskets and ox carts with wooden wheels (which in some places are still used today). We also lost ourselves in crazy, contemporary art for a couple of hours in the modern art museum next door.

Then we walked outside the city where we caught a view of the old part of town from a hilltop and visited the Colexiata de Santa María do Sar, a Romanesque church whose walls are slanted by fifteen degrees! It was built starting in 1211 near the river Sar, which in part caused the slanting of the walls. Architects saved the building in the 1700s when it was on the verge of collapse. It is quite a sight to see the inside, because the two rows of pillars slant away from the center like a V.

Saturday night we watched England lose to South Africa in the rugby championship in a crowded, rowdy, Irish pub. It seemed like all of the English people in Santiago had congregated there. It was fun to watch them get excited and cheer, though their cheers were very limited: all they really sang was "Swing low, sweet chariot" over and over. After the game, we wandered around a park on a hill overlooking the cathedral that night trying to find the city’s botellón. (The city has tons of parks – half the city map is green for park.) When we finally found it, we discovered how lucky we are to live in Granada, where you can always count on a huge crowd of young people drinking outside, but Santiago’s botellón consisted of about five groups of people.

On Sunday I had a coffee and a piece of “Torta de Santiago,” a sweet, almond cake with the Santiago symbol in the powdered sugar, a cake which you find all around the city. Then we went to the daily noontime Pilgrim’s mass in the cathedral, which was very interesting. First, a priest listed all the countries of pilgrims who had come to Santiago that day from all the different routes. “From Santander, two from Germany, one from Korea, three from Sweden, one from Canada, …” It gives you an idea of how widespread and important this pilgrimage still is today. At one point in the ceremony, various priests said a few words, each in a different language – Italian, German, Hindu, etc.

Walking around the cathedral we saw lots of people wearing hiking boots and hiking packs piled against the Renaissance columns. Many of the people in attendance were pilgrims, others plain tourists like us, others locals dressed in their Sunday best.

The conclusion of the ceremony was the coolest part. Passing through the cathedral earlier, we had noticed a peculiar, elaborate pulley system in front of the altar. This, it turns out, is the “Botafumeiro,” a metal incense-burner that the priests swing over the crowd. On the other end of the rope there are eight rope handles for eight priests to grab onto, which they use to pull on the incense-burner to make it swing, much like you “pump” when you swing on a playground swing. As the globe billows smoke that quickly fills the cathedral with a Christmas-like smell, the priests rhythmically pull downward in unison to make it swing higher and higher. Soon the globe is swinging back and forth across a huge, 30-meter arc from floor to ceiling along the short part of the cross-shaped cathedral. I was kindof afraid, as the incense-burner swung back toward the floor, that it would hit people. Though it’s hard to describe the “Botafumeiro” event or capture it with pictures, it suffices to say that it was stunning to watch.

Next we did a ritual that pilgrims have done for seven centuries and is the spiritual climax of their journey: climb the steps behind the altar and place your hand on a golden clamshell, which has been done by so many people that there are now five grooves for each of your fingers.

Leaving the cathedral, we took a seat on the steps on adjacent Praza da Quintana (Plaza de la Quintana), which has the unique characteristic of being inaccessible to cars, in order to people-watch. Ten minutes later, a protest marched into the square bearing signs written in Gallego and rhythmically chanting “They aren’t delinquents, they are innocent!” and other slogans. Thousands of people – young and old, hippy and elegantly dressed – filled the square, all of them wearing a sticker that read “INDULTO XA,” which I think translates to something like “JUSTICE NOW.” I asked a few of the protesting Gallegos what they were protesting for and gathered that three young men had been wrongfully convicted seven years ago and remain in jail today. It was interesting to see such a pacific protest. (Gallegos, by the way, have desires of independence, but theirs don’t match those of Catalans or Basques.)

Later that afternoon, we visted the Iglesia y Museo de San Martín Pinario, an old monastery bordering the catedral that has riotous, golden, baroque decoration in its altars and impressive wooden carvings in its seat rooms. Also, in the museum it was cool to see old math books, science inventions from the 1800s, and old pharmaceutical goods – roots, leaves, etc. – that pilgrims used to use for everything from blistered feet to rabies.

A Few Photos from Córdoba

2007-10-17T12:59:00.000+02:00

I can't seem to upload all of my photos, so I just picked out a few good ones.

The classic brick and stone arches of the Mosque.

Using one of the columns in the mosque as a back scratcher.

Light from a stained glass window in the mosque fell onto this little corner of the mosque, and I just had to make a funny pose with it.

I climbed on this statue just outside the mosque in a plaza overlooking the Guadalquivir river and pretended to ride it.

Tropical Fruits

2007-10-17T12:34:00.000+02:00

Being close to the coast, I am fortunate to have tried some strange tropical fruits that I had never had before, and I love 'em.

Top: Avocados from my señora's family's farm. Used in salads daily now.

Left: Pomegranates (in Spanish: "Granadas") that I picked outside the Hospital Real.

Center: 1 tomato, the rest are "caquis" which are sweet and grow only in tropical reasons, from the señora's family's farm.

Right: Chirimolla (they look like wavy-skinned avocados). Sweet, white flesh with black, watermelon-like seeds that you spit out. Very expensive in supermarkets. Also from señora's family's farm.

Right bottom: Golden Delicious apple. Except here in Spain they aren't so delicious. There are few kinds of apples available and they're often mushy and never crisp. I've been craving a Honeycrisp or Pink Lady apple.

Sports and Exercise in Spain

2007-10-16T21:10:00.000+02:00

Fran asked me some good questions about Spain: “Is fitness the passion it is in among some people in the U.S.? What do women my age (75) do for exercise in Spain? What about athletics for women in Spain's schools? What sports are the most popular?”

Fitness is very different here in Spain compared to in the US. For one, people in general don’t do sports and exercise for the sake of fitness as much here. While I do see runners and bikers around Granada, I don’t see as many as I would in a similarly sized American city.

I can think of several reasons for this. First, people walk a lot more here, especially in the center of town where the streets are narrow and cars are a hassle. Second, the quality of food is better – the Mediterranean diet is heavy on olive oil, for example – so that you don’t feel like you have to go for a run to burn off that greasy burger you just ate like you sometimes do in the US. Also there are fewer obese people here, probably as a result of more walking and healthier food, so exercise isn’t as necessary to stay healthy and slim.

The third reason people don’t exercise for the sake of fitness as much here compared to the US also answers the last question: fewer people play organized sports because schools in general don’t have organized teams. If you want to play on an organized volleyball team, for example, you have to join a private club team since your high school doesn’t have a team. As a result, fewer people play on organized sports teams, and if you do play organized sports you probably play fewer sports since you need to devote lots of time and money toward each.

The University of Granada, it turns out, does in fact have a men’s basketball team. The reason I know this is some friends of mine met some exceedingly tall (by Spanish standards) men who turned out to be members of the university team.

There is a small, urban soccer field not far from my house where I have peeked at some youth soccer games. Besides soccer, basketball and handball are other popular team sports to play. The most popular spectator sports are soccer (of course), basketball, Formula 1 (kind of like Indy racing) and motorcycle racing.

Another common way to get exercise is dancing, such as salsa, meringue and flamenco. On Sunday, for example, I got to see a flamenco performance by a bunch of five-year old girls on a stage in a plaza during a festival. Even five-year old girls really get into flamenco! Some of them had some impressive moves.

I’ve gone to a few free salsa classes in bars, which are fun, but I get completely outclassed by Spaniards who have practiced it for years whenever the instruction pauses and couples dance. I’m now an expert at the basic step though, so ¡toma!

As for what señoras do for exercise, mine (age 55 or so) never does anything resembling exercise other than “dando un paseo” (going for a walk), and I think this is typical among people her age and older. It is quite funny to see the main pedestrian streets of the city around 7 to 11 p.m., because they’re always full of elderly couples going for a walk. When the weather was hot in September, I used to see grandmothers and even mothers with babies walking around at midnight since the temperature dropped to pleasant levels at night.

After my weeklong vacation next week, during which I’m traveling all around the north of Spain with four other guys, I plan on joining a gym near my house.

On a related note to exercise, I went for a run yesterday in which, like seemingly every run I do here, I discovered some cool sites. This time I took my usual route up the hill next to the one on which the Alhambra sits, past the gardens and irrigation above the Alhambra, and kept climbing. Soon I reached the top of the hill, turned around and couldn’t keep myself from swearing “Holy shit!” at the unbelievable view of the city and the backside of the Alhambra. Panting from the steep ascent, I stretched as I scanned the city for landmarks that I recognized – the cathedral, the mall, the big hotel near my house, the railroad station…

With another 45 minutes before the annoyingly early 8 p.m. sunset, I decided to keep climbing. Before I knew it I was cut off from the city and running in a clay-red field olive trees. I had discovered the “parque periurbano.” It was a cool feeling to feel cut off from the city – the only buildings I could see were the white houses of mountain pueblos in the Sierra Nevada mountains to the south – and in such a classic Spanish setting – a field of olive trees. A mile further up the mountain I happened upon an ancient “aljibe” (a structure that collects and stores rainwater) built by Muslims centuries ago, according to the sign next to it.

A bit different than happening upon a new Starbucks on a typical run in the US, wouldn’t you say?

Pictures from the medieval market, Cabo de Gata

2007-10-15T11:08:00.000+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100167

I'm working on uploading my 63 pictures from Córdoba, but I'm having trouble, so stay tuned for those.

Spontaneous Trip to a Hidden Beach

2007-10-15T09:48:00.001+02:00

I had heard great stories about little-known beaches in a place called Cabo de Gata (“Cape of the Cat”), a national park where virgin beaches stretch for miles and where multiple films had been made. Several friends had pledged interest in going, but as the weekend approached nearly everyone bowed out. At 3 a.m. in a bar late Friday night, however, two friends and I spontaneously decided, “what the heck, let’s wake up four hours from now and go to Cabo de Gata!”

And so at 7 a.m. I grudgingly got out of bed, replied “SÍ” to a text message from one of the other friends that said “Are we really doing this?”, made myself some bangin’ bocadillos that had chorizo, cheese and avocado (señoras always make one-ingredient bocadillos), and headed over to the bus station.

Eleven euros and two hours later, I was in Almería, a relatively big city on the Mediterranean, where we had to catch yet another bus to Cabo de Gata. Finally around 11:30 a.m. we got to the beach, but it wasn’t the miles-long, virgin beaches of lore. Instead, the beach we found was lined with trash and covered with old, rotting boats.

It turns out, despite the fact that everyone says “go to Cabo de Gata” and the brochures all talk about how great the beaches are in “Cabo de Gata,” you really aren’t supposed to take the bus to “Cabo de Gata.” You’re supposed to take a bus to San José. Cabo de Gata, it turns out, is not just a national park but also a small town on the coast that has some mediocre beaches. San José is a town twenty kilometers down the coast and around the cape from where you can walk a mile to the virgin beaches. We asked a local and found out there is no bus from the town of Cabo de Gata, where we were, to San José. Because of time constraints we couldn’t take a bus back to Almería and catch the bus to San José.

Fortunately the two other girls I was with were very adventurous and open-minded (they went to Oktoberfest without hostel reservations and ended up sleeping in the hallway of some Italians’ flat). So we relaxed on the beaches of Cabo de Gata, giggling at our predicament, and enjoyed the sun. It still was an awesome time: we dipped our feet in the (now cold) Mediterranean, watched windsurfers fly by on the water and chased after little salamanders dashing along the beach.

Even if you don’t get exactly to where you want to go, you can still count your blessings of where you actually are. In my case it was: “Wow, I’m in Spain… on a beach… looking out on the Mediterranean… soaking up the sun… in mid-October.”

Bib Rambla, an Annual Medieval Market in Granada

2007-10-15T09:47:00.001+02:00

When I got back to Granada from Córdoba at 7:30 p.m. on Friday night, some friends and I headed toward the cathedral since we heard there was going to be a medieval market there all weekend. I never would have thought I would stay there for two hours and eat so much that I skipped dinner at home.

The market consists of vendors dressed up in medieval outfits selling artisan breads, cakes, chocolate, churros, nuts, olives, cheeses, sausages, soaps, wooden toys. I either got free samples of or bought a little bit of just about everything. This one fat green olive I had was an explosion of flavor unlike any I had experienced before. I watched a lady make by hand the huge, chocolate-dipped churros that I ate. The crust on the raisin bread I ate was so deliciously hard that it almost hurt my teeth. The cheeses there rivaled Wisconsin’s best. The atmosphere of being in a crowded, medieval-style market that meandered around a towering, Gothic cathedral beneath the setting sun was almost overwhelming.

Wowed in Córdoba

2007-10-15T09:44:00.000+02:00

On Friday, as the sun was rising and just beginning to warm the chilly, nighttime air, twenty of us students (i.e., half of the school) boarded a bus to Córdoba. The two-hour ride took us through mountains and fields upon fields upon fields of olive trees. (Andalusía, which has the ideal climate for olives, produces 85% of Spain’s olives. Wisconsin is to corn as Andalusía is to olives.)

Córdoba was once the capital of Al-Andalus, the Arabic name for Spain when it (or most of it, at least) was under Muslim control (namely, 711-1492). Since the caliphs ruled from Córdoba, lots of impressive relics from that epoch remain today. In its heyday, Córdoba was one of the largest, most spectacular cities in the world, far more so than Paris or London were. The three capitals of the Muslim world were Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba, so Córdoba was the capital of the western Muslim world.

First we visited the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, a castle/palace that houses a collection of marvelous Roman mosaics. It was surreal to see intricate mosaics of plants, people and geometric patterns laid down by Romans two thousand years ago. The Spanish kings built a palace on top of the Roman ruins, some of which are visible today (and I think they reused some of the white pillars as benches). The royal gardens were also pretty (see pictures), my favorite part of which were the tall bushes that were trimmed to exactly resemble erect phalluses.

Next we walked around the Jewish quarter, one of the oldest neighborhoods of Córdoba. The streets are extremely narrow to create a breeze, which is much needed in the hot summers, in the same way that the skyscrapers of Chicago force the wind to pick up speed (hence the name the “windy city”). We saw some beautiful patios filled with plants and flowers and a tiny, old synagogue that has Muslim art decoration on the walls (it resembled the walls of the Alhambra). Christians had converted it into a church, building new walls to cover the Hebrew writings and Muslim architecture, but the ancient synagogue beneath was recently discovered, so they decided to make it a tourist site. This is an example of how for a time three cultures – Muslim, Jewish and Christian – coexisted peacefully. (Then came the Inquisition…)

The Alcázar and the Jewish quarter were cool, but I had seen similar sites before in Sevilla and Granada. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the Mezquita-Catedral. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen.

In the eight-century the Muslims needed a great mosque (“mezquita”) for their capital city. With all the wealth acquired from the Iberian Peninsula, they created a magnificent one. The best way I can describe the sensation of being inside of the mosque is that it reminded me of Moria in The Lord of the Rings: it’s a somewhat dark expanse peppered by scores of columns. Each column is unique in shape and even height because they were recycled from various Roman structures. The double arches between the columns have a very unique red-white pattern: the alternation of red bricks and white stone allows the structure to absorb vibrations.

By the ninth century, this mosque wasn’t big enough for the burgeoning city, so they built another section of the mosque, and then they added an even bigger section in the tenth century, each section more intricate than the last. (It’s very funny to think of the 10th century section of the mosque as “not so old.”)

Of course when the Christians conquered Córdoba (or “re-conquered” as they like to call it) they converted this spectacular mosque into a church, so they knocked down a large section in the middle of the mosque and created a huge, excessively decorated church. The mahogany used to create the elaborately carved seats was brought back from Cuba in the sixteenth century.

After chowing down the bocadillos our señoras made for us (or “boca-d’s” as we like to call them), we had a couple of hours of free time, so I walked all around the city. It’s amazing how much varied history there is in the city: I saw an ancient Roman bridge over the Guadalquivir River that was built following the victory of Caesar over Pompey, a large red-brick square called Plaza de la Corredera that was used for bullfighting, a plaza with a 16th-century fountain which once served as a livestock market and which was made famous when Cervantes mentioned it in “Don Quijote.”

Visit to the Hospital Real (Royal Hospital)

2007-10-11T18:58:00.000+02:00

As we do every Thursday, my art class visited another cool site in Granada today, this time the Hospital Real. Located on the north side of the city (a bit far away from the city center to quarantine the illnesses from the population), the Hospital Real was constructed under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella and finished by their grandson, Carlos V. The square structure is divided into four parts -- one for homeless, old, or orphaned people, and the others for grouping together similar illnesses -- and in the center was a church. Nowadays the building is free to the public, has exhibits throughout the year, and serves as the University of Granada's administrative building and biblioteca (library). 

Outside the building a friend and I picked fresh pomegranates off the trees and indulged ourselves as we walked around the cool, wide-open, Renaissance patios. The purpose of our visit was to see Mudéjar art, or art built during the transition period between a Muslim and Christian society. After the Christians slowly conquered the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, starting from the north and working down to the south and finishing in Granada, they employed the defeated Moors to build new buildings and art, so of course you see Muslim and Christian elements in art from that period. For example, Muslim roofs are wooden and have the typical star decorations carved into it. You see these wooden roofs next to Gothic, Christian-style roofs of stone.

The library was my favorite part. The oldest library on the campus, it contains ancient documents from Granada monasteries and often has them on display (unfortunately they were being restored when we visited). As you can see in the photos I took, the library is impressive: the roofs are the extravagantly carved, magnificent, wooden roofs typical of the Muslim artisans, while the roof at the center is stone, Christian-style. I definitely want to come back here to study sometime. It sure beats the boring cement structure that is College Library in Madison.

Salobreña pictures

2007-10-08T19:05:00.000+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt/100123

All-Day Fiesta in Salobreña

2007-10-07T18:04:00.000+02:00

What follows is a description of the coolest day I’ve spent so far in Spain.

Although I love Granada it’s hard to stay here for an entire weekend, so on Saturday I decided to take a day-trip to yet another beach town, this time Salobreña, with some friends. My señora had told me there is a parade and fiesta in Salobreña on Saturday for their Virgin Day celebration. When the one-way bus ticket costs just five euros, and the picturesque beach town is just an hour away, why not go?

I arrived with a friend in Salobreña at noon, and by the time we walked half a mile to the beach and a mile along it to where the fiesta was we had just missed the parade. Fortunately, however, another group of my friends, five girls, had caught the bus an hour earlier and caught the parade. As they watched the floats go by, one particularly rowdy float consisting of twenty- and thirty-year old guys wearing classic, rustic Spain outfits (jeans, work books, white shirt, black vest, red sash and red handkerchief) invited the girls to join them. Feeling awkward and unsure whether to join the parade of all Spaniards when they clearly stood out as Americans, the girls joined the parade and went along for the ride. Since they stood out so much as Americans, people snapped pictures of the girls as they walked along the parade.

By the time I arrived at the post-parade fiesta, the five girls were being offered free drinks and food left and right from the float of guys and even other family floats, as well. (It seemed like each extended family had a float, and each family had its own leg of ham.) I was fortunate to be the only guy amongst 7 girls, because I think that helped us get offered so much free food and drink from the float of guys. Before I knew it, I was given a bottle of Cruzcampo and offered all kinds of typical Spanish dishes: tortilla española, ensalada rusa, sausages, chorizo, Serrano ham, on and on. When I was offered baby-back ribs (no BBQ sauce, of course; they never use sauces in Spain like we do in the U.S.) I knew I was in heaven.

Here’s a description of the party: just 20 meters from the Mediterranean, there are dozens of floats arranged haphazardly in an open, sandy space, each filled with people dressed up in nice, Spanish-looking clothing, all eating and drinking Spanish cuisine the entire afternoon. There’s flamenco music and dancing at this float, reggaeton at that float, fierce discussions among old guys at that float. Horses and carriages abound. With their classic Spain clothing, some of the horseback riders could be mistaken for Zorro. The females are dressed in flamenco dresses, while many males are dressed in ways that mimic the guys in the party float described above – white shirt, red scarf, maybe a black hat.

In one corner of the fiesta was the biggest pan of paella I had ever seen. It was probably 10 feet in diameter, and beneath it a mini bonfire provided the heat. It was interesting to periodically watch them cook the paella: first they dumped two industrial size tubs of olive oil, then they added buckets of chicken and peppers, etc., all the while stirring it with rakes and other ludicrously large instruments.

After eating, drinking, chatting with locals and soaking up the scene for a couple of hours we moved into a building to cool off from the sun (it’s October and it’s still hot), where we were treated like VIP partiers and offered more food and an open bar. It was a familiar atmosphere – our new Salobreña friends said that they know everyone who lives in the town – even to the point that they trusted the bar to two thirteen year old girls, who eagerly fought over who would get to mix your drink or popped the cap off your bottle for you.

Maybe it was the beverages or fact that it was a holiday, but the people in Salobreña were much nicer than people in Granada. Even Spaniards will tell you that Granadinos, in general, are not the nicest people, which I’ve definitely noticed in clothing stores, cafés, bike shops, bars, everywhere; people in Granada usually aren’t eager to help you or particularly happy that you’re a foreigner. In Salobreña, on the other hand, people never flinched an eye when they saw us, and everyone, from the float of guys eager to flirt with the American girls to the individual families, generously offered food and drink.

One of my friends summed up the experience and the atmosphere best by stating simply: “You know, this is Spain. This really is Spain.” Save for perhaps a British couple or two, we were the only foreigners there amongst the thousand-plus fiesteros (party-goers), which was a really cool feeling.

Flamenco

2007-10-04T12:31:00.000+02:00

I saw a Flamenco show last night with my school in Sacramonte (the gypsy neighborhood of cave homes next to the Albayzin). I got a good seat near the stage from where I had the privilege of seeing the dancers' feet, which were quite a sight to see. One by one, one of the five dancers takes his or her turn dancing, while the other dancers sit on the perimeter, clapping or drumming beats. Another guy claps and sings, while yet another plays the guitar. The singing is kindof ugly-sounding but apparently very difficult to do. The two male dancers were my favorite because they did some fancy, almost acrobatic moves on their high-heel, metal-capped shoes. The women often wore very stern faces and furrowed their brows as they danced. You also apparently don't have to maintain a great physique to be a professional flamenco dancer: two of the three women were, um, "hefty." One cool aspect of the music and dancing was that there was never repetition, no "chorus" that they fall back on; instead, the songs constantly evolve and never repeat.

It seemed like classic Spain: sipping on a glass of sangria while a watching dark-haired, fierce, black- and red-clad woman dancing to clapping beats and a flamenco guitar.

Pictures

Happy Virgin Mary Day!

2007-09-30T21:43:00.000+02:00

Every year for the Día de la Virgen Granadinos fill the street to watch a painfully slow parade, culminating with the float of the Virgin Mary. I had to cross through huge crowds and the procession itself to get to where I was meeting my intercambio. The only people who come out to see the procession are old people, especially old women who all carry white candels, and kids under age 5. I didn't seen anyone in the ages between. A Spanish friend of my joked to me that it could also be called the procession of old ladies.

I uploaded 4 pictures of it here: http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100098

Class

2007-09-28T20:24:00.001+02:00

I am taking five classes here: Spanish Syntax (advanced grammar), Spanish Conversation, Spanish Literature up to 1700, Art History and Culture of Islam. I think I am alone when I say that advanced grammar is my favorite class. Grammar is like the mathematics of a language – there are a bunch of rules you learn, then you go apply it – which is probably why I like it so much. For some reason grammar comes easier for my mathematical mind, yet things like playing music or drawing do not. (A lucky friend of my just scored a job playing music at a bar weekly for 40 euros a night!)

This is not to say that I don’t like the other classes, as I enjoy them all. Art History class could almost be called “Granada art tourist” class, for each week we spend two hours on Tuesday learning about a period in art history, then on Thursday we go visit some cathedral/palace/whatever that belongs to that period in art history. Thus far we have toured La Capilla Real (Gothic), where the Reyes Católicos (i.e., Ferdinand and Isabel) are buried under fantastic marble caskets; La Catedral (Renaissance), the giant cathedral built by the Reyes Católicos that is white and tranquil inside; and La Cartuja (Baroque), a church for cartujos (monks) that is so covered in decoration that it is nerve-racking and ugly. My señora became defensive of La Cartuja when I told her afterwards that I thought it was ugly and too busy. Whoops. Whatever that place really is hideous. I can’t believe people choose to have their weddings there.

Among my five classes, I have four different teachers, all of whom I like. These teachers have a pretty sweet job: work four days a week, just speak slowly in your native language. (I am getting a glimpse of what Sam is doing right now in China. Kindof.)

One of my teachers, Elsa, (we’re on a first-name basis with all of our teachers) is particularly fun. I have her for conversation and literature. She starts every class by explaining or teaching some random thing about Spanish, Spaniards or Spain, usually something related to what we students were chatting about just before class started. Yesterday, for example, a girl was relating a story about a funny, dirty comment she got from a Spanish guy on the street the previous night. This launched Elsa into a story about a ridiculous comment she once got from a Spanish guy in the street (it ended with “quiero hacerte un pijama de saliva” – if you don’t know what that means, no pasa nada (no big deal)).

Literature is definitely my hardest class: analyzing poems is hard enough in English, it’s even harder in a foreign language. There is something beautiful about tight, little poems with just the right syllables and consonant rhyming that nevertheless manages to make some comment about life. Still, I can’t help thinking of the comment by some famous physicist that goes something like this: Physics is about explaining the world in a concise, easy to understand way, while Poetry is about explaining the world in a dense, confusing way.

Trip to Post-Katrina New Orleans, er.. Almuñecar

2007-09-23T21:07:00.000+02:00

Granada got a rare all-day rain on Friday. This didn’t stop my señora from continuing to dry clothes, as she draped a big plastic sheet over the clothesline. (The picture below turned out funny because of the rain.)

I met for the first time with my “intercambio” (a Spanish student in Granada with whom you switch off practicing English and Spanish) on Friday. Nearly everyone in my school signed up to get an intercambio, as it’s a great way to practice your conversational Spanish and meet a local. My intercambio is a 28 year old biology PhD student at the University of Granada named Ana Santos. Every semester she gets an intercambio with a student at my school to continue practicing her English, which seemed pretty good. (That was one of the things I learned from her in the hour and half we chatted over coffee – how to say “pretty” as a modifier – turns out you say “bastante.”) She is a nerdy and interesting woman who kills mice in her experiments for her PhD thesis on the retina and central nervous system. We will try to meet once a week throughout the semester to keep practicing each other’s language.

On Friday night I stayed in to watch a Spanish-dubbed version of Flight of the Phoenix. Because of the paucity, slowness and simplicty of the dialogue – such as “we need to build a plane!” – I was able to understand most of the movie, which was fun. There is a stack of dubbed movies in the living room that must belong to one of the daughters, so I will be able to practice my listening skills a lot with those this semester.

While it’s still warm, I wanted to go to the beach one more time, so on Saturday I took a bus with 3 other guys and 4 girls to Almuñecar, a beach town an hour south and east of Granada. Since I biked to the bus station instead of taking a bus there, I saved 1 euro, which I spent on an issue of Granada Hoy, Granada’s newspaper. The main story was pages upon pages documenting the disaster in Andalusian towns after Friday’s storm. The town hit the worst? Almuñecar. A major bridge had broke, underground car garages had flooded with water, debris was strewn everywhere.

An hour later we stepped off the bus into the disaster zone. Mud was everywhere. Even the steps leading to the second floor of the bus station were covered in mud, so the entire building must have been flooded. Walking on the sidewalks was like walking on ice, for the mud was so slippery.

The city didn’t have water, either. We passed a long line of residents holding buckets and jugs, waiting to fill up on potable water from a truck. Our hostel hadn’t yet had a chance to clean our rooms because they didn’t have access to water, so we dropped our bags off and headed to the beach. Fortunately the plumbing started working by late afternoon, so we were able to get our rooms when we came back from the beach at 7:30 pm.

A new “river” of muddy water had formed on the beach, dumping the contents of the city into the Mediterranean. A mound of tree branches and other debris lined the entire stretch of the beach. What’s more, the first thirty feet of water was brown, after which it quickly transitioned to the typical azure blue. It didn’t occur to us until later that night that maybe we shouldn’t have swum there.

That night we feasted on affordable, delicious seafood, sharing amongst us plates of swordfish and rosada, fried squid and fried anchovies, shrimp and mussels. On Sunday we spent several more hours on the beach and checked out the view from the obnoxiously large cross perched on a hill jutting into the sea. At night it glows and looks like it’s floating in the air. The mud around the city had dried by Sunday, but people were busy cleaning up debris and water pumps slowly drained structures that had flooded. (A car garage across the street from my hostel, for example, was a three-story hole in the ground that had completely filled to street level with water, mud and debris. It was surreal to see gigantic cranes utterly submerged in the muck.)

I plan on staying in Granada the next two weekends to see the procession next Sunday for the Virgin festival, ride my bike, save money and get to know Granada even better. Tomorrow I have my first exam – on Spanish Literature in the Middle Ages – so I have to study for real for the first time since May. I remarked in Almuñecar this weekend that this feels like the longest summer of my life, since I still feel like I’m on summer break here: I take classes in Spanish during the week and travel to the beach or the mountains on the three-day weekends. What a life!

Pictures from Almuñecar: http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100089

I Got A Bike!

2007-09-21T21:27:00.000+02:00

I bought the cheapest Orbea mountain bike so I can bike to school and go for rides around town and on trails near the city. I plan on selling it somehow in December. One hurdle is where to keep it: I can't keep it in my apartment, so I bought a Kryptonite Trek U-Lock and will keep it locked on a street nearby. I also have locked the quick-release seat to the frame using a thin coil lock that I brought from home. I just have to hope and pray that no one cuts this lock and takes my seat and rear wheel.

I went for my first real ride last night and saw some new parts of the city, including the soccer stadium and some suburbs, which have tan and yellow colors and feels like a desert city, very different from the city center where I live. I also climbed one of the hills overlooking the city where I took the below photographs.

Bike shops are different here: they are cramped, as shown below, and the workers are not helpful and don't make an effort to "sell" to you. I simply told him what bike I wanted, paid, and rode away. You can't "test" bikes here, either; you just have to look at it, pay for it and hope it is what you wanted.

The Food At Home

2007-09-21T21:03:00.000+02:00

It has been interesting to experience the Mediterranean diet of a typical, middle class Spanish family. What impresses me most is how few ingredients you find in the kitchen: there’s always a huge bag of tomatoes, several green peppers, a basket of garlic, tubs of olives and an endless supply of olive oil. There’s no spice cabinet containing all spices from A to Z like we have in the U.S.; instead, Spaniards mostly just use salt, pepper and garlic.

My host mother’s family is from a small town south of Granada, where they still have a farm where they grow, among other things, grapes, eggplant, pumpkins, figs and hairy apples – all of which we sometimes have in our kitchen. They also grow avocados there, which should be ripe in a month or two (I can’t wait!), and oranges that unfortunately won’t be ripe till January. The student my señora hosts during the spring is lucky, she told me, because he gets to drink fresh-squeezed orange juice daily.

My señora is a good cook (thank goodness), and I asked her to teach me how to cook paella one day. The only complaint I have is her lentil soup: it’s great when you eat it, but hours later your stomach expands to month-four-pregnancy-size because of all the gas. Some of my favorite dishes have been cream of pumpkin soup, calamari in soup or pasta, paella and fried eggplant.

I took some pictures of my kitchen and uploaded them here: http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100082

A Sunday in Granada: An Outdoor Market and a Bike Race

2007-09-16T19:54:00.000+02:00

Ever since I arrived in Granada I have wanted to go to an outdoor market that sells cheap clothing that is leftover from the designer stores. For one thing, I needed a black belt to go along with my new five dollar, super-euro black shoes, but I didn’t want to pay twenty euros in the stores. I fulfilled both of those wishes this morning.

The “mercadillo” is located so far north that it’s on the edge of the city and barely included in my largest city map. It took me an hour an fifteen minutes to walk there in my best walking shoes (this is just one reason why I want a bike). I am so tacaño (stingy) that I almost never take buses or taxis to get around town.

Spices, jeans and shoes at the mercadillo.

I met up with some other friends at the market and shopped for an hour and a half, in the end walking away with four European-style (i.e., tight-fitting lycra) boxers, six argyle socks, a black belt and light blue/yellow track pants – all for about fifteen euros. Sweet!

On the walk back, I began to notice the professional cycling team buses and vans infiltrating the city. I saw the buses of Lampre and Liquigas, two Italian cycling teams, parked at this hotel, the squadron of T-Mobile buses at that hotel.

One of my favorite things to do is explore cities – I do it so much, whether on my bike in Madison or on walks and runs in Granada, that I could probably consider it a hobby. I hadn’t yet seen the Plaza de Toros (bull ring) nor the University of Granada campus, so I walked past those on my way home. The campus is very different from American ones: as far as I could tell there is no central avenue with a big fountain or rotunda or Bascom hill or anything to decorate brochures of the campus; it seems like just a conglomerate of buildings. At the Plaza de Toros I stumbled upon a fiesta with flamenco and a long line of people waiting to eat a plate of stew and a ring-shaped piece of bread (variety in food choices is not a forte of Spain).

Plaza de Toros.

Fiesta with flamenco I stumbled upon.

At 3:30 pm, I flipped on the TV and watched the peloton of the Vuelta a España climb the 10 to 15% climbs near the mountain town of Monachil, thirty kilometers away from the sprint finish in downtown Granada. Knowing they travel an average of forty kilometers an hour and so were fifty minutes from finishing, I left my house to catch the final sprint on a big boulevard downtown. After meeting up with a few friends (I had emailed the whole group earlier this week about seeing the race), I found a good spot around 175 meters from the finish line, from where I could hear the announcer updating the gathering crowd on the gap the breakway had on the peloton.

Five kilometers to go... two kilometers to go… one kilometer to go… 500 meters to go…. The crowd, now three or more people deep on either side of the last 500 meters, readied their personal cameras and banged rhythmically on the advertisements lining the barricades of the sprint like drummers preparing for battle. The announcer rattled away in Spanish the status of the duel occurring between the two breakway riders. The tension was at its climax.

Suddenly two riders appeared in the distance, flanked by mopeds and team cars. Assured they wouldn’t be caught by the chase groups, they slowed their pace, testing each other, seeing who would jump at the sprint first. Around where I was standing, one of them jumped, and thus began the frantic sprint. In the end, Samuel Sanchez of the Euskaltel-Euskadi team won the stage.

Because of the category 1 (i.e., hardest) climb in Monachil thirty kilometers earlier, the peloton had been blown apart and separated into small groups. Every few minutes the drumming on the advertisements would rebuild as another group of riders would finish, each group more dejected and tired than the last. After all the riders finished, I witnessed the presentation of the awards (for general classification, stage winner, best team, etc.) on the podium in which a rider puts on the award jersey and gives dos besos (the “two kisses” European greeting) to the beautiful women on either side of him.

It was surreal to see all of the professional racers, some of whose names and faces I recognized, to envy their fancy bikes as they slowly pedaled through the crowd, and to gawk at their bulging legs. Seeing the faces of the best bike racers on Earth makes the world seem a bit smaller, for you forget that they are normal, human beings when you only see them on television, websites or magazines.

I’ve been trying to resist buying or renting a bike, but I can’t help it that my thoughts have been utterly consumed by it every day. It’s hard not to want a bike when you spend hours each day simply walking from place to place in the city. I spoke with the resident director of my program, who happens to be an avid road biker, during the Alpujarra trip about biking in Granada, local cycling clubs, and stores. It turns out the bike shop I pass on my commute to school every day is the one he recommends. I’ll check it out tomorrow.

The other obstacle is where to park it: my señora, never supportive of my desire to bike, says a bike wouldn’t fit in the apartment (it would: if I took off the front wheel, I could fit it in my room). I have also scoped out a metal fence that somewhat resembles a bike rack in the plaza two blocks from the house; my only worry is that it’s illegal to lock bikes to it (though there’s no sign) and the police would cut my lock.

Hiking in the Sierra Nevadas

2007-09-15T22:06:00.000+02:00

On Friday morning, twenty other students and I boarded an 8:30 am bus to La Alpujarra, a very early time for Spanish standards and probably the earliest I have awoken here so far. This is one of the few trips that the program puts on; the other two are the Alhambra tour and an upcoming day-trip to Córdoba. It’s nice to have transportation, tour guides, food and a hostel planned and paid for already.

For some reason I thought the bus would go past the Alhambra and head northeast but instead it went south out of Granada; I guess it doesn’t matter since Granada is surrounded on all sides by mountains. We drove south on a freeway and then turned east to climb into the mountains on a windy, narrow highway with a feeble-looking guardrail.

La Alpujarra is the name for the numerous small towns with all white houses that are located on the mountainsides of the Sierra Nevadas. Each town has a few hundred citizens and some touristy stuff, such as restaurants, shops and hostels, since a lot of people come to hike. The highest peak is 3000-some meters, yet 40 kilometers to the south is the Mediterranean, so the terrain slopes steeply down to sea level. On clear days you can see the sea from where we were hiking, but we couldn’t see it through the distant haze.

We hiked from about 10:30 am to 5 pm, however considering all the breaks we took we only hiked for a couple of hours total. It was funny to hike with such a mix of people, some who were athletic and open-minded, others who were neither of those. I couldn’t believe how much a couple of them complained of being “dirty.” We hiked from pueblo to pueblo, stopping frequently for people to catch their breath (it was often steep) and to fill water from the water fountains.

Water is an important part of life in La Alpujarra. As you can imagine, the water from the Sierra Nevadas is clear, cold and excellent to drink; in fact, the Lanjarón water bottle company has its factory here. Many streets have a small canal of water flowing down it. Antiquated water fountains are found all over the pueblos and even on the hiking paths. Old “lavaderos,” or laundry buildings in which women socialize and wash clothes on washboards with water from the mountain’s rivers, are still intact today.

These mountains were once inhabited by the Moors, who built terraces into the steep terrain in order to farm cereal crops. At one point we stopped at a semicircular lookout point with a couple of large chestnut trees, brought to the area by Romans, and where the Muslims used to grind their wheat using a mule walking in a circle. At lower elevations, the Moors grew more tropical crops such as oranges. They were also famous for their silk, which they transported by mule over the mountains to sell in Granada or down to the Mediterranean to ship it to the Middle East. It is surreal to stand in mountains with such history.

The hiking trails on which we walked were the same ones walked by the Moors. A striking change in vegetation occurs from one side of the trail to the other: above is forest, while below is grass and few trees. The reason is because of the water canals, still instact alongside the hiking trails today, that the Moors built. The trail we hiked on the second day was a Medieval Ages trail that goes from Gibralter to Athens. It’s like the Appalachian trail of Europe, only way, way older! There are several other trails like it that criss-cross Europe. It is crazy to think that I walked the same trail as traveling jesters and knights of Medieval times!

On day one we hiked from pueblo to pueblo around a drainage, stopping for lunch (at 3 pm, according to Spanish eating schedules, of course!) when we crossed over the river. That lunch was definitely the best trail lunch I had ever had: baguettes, sheep cheese, jamón serrano, salchicha (sausage), chorizo, tomatoes, zucchini, apples and tortilla española. We also frequently passed trailside bushes of blackberries, which were ripe and plentiful.

That night, we ate dinner together (pre-paid – sweet!), where I shared the funkiest dinners on the menu with another, equally adventurous friend: swordfish and rabbit. The swordfish filet was good, not great: it was white, a bit dry, but fortunately wasn’t at all “fishy.” The conejo, on the other hand, was delectable. It tasted like super-chicken. The best part: the entire rabbit was on the plate – head, feet, and all! Thumper, as we lovingly named him, had his head pointed directly toward a vegetarian girl on my friend’s right. Ha!

On day two, we hiked up and over one of the ridgelines (other students, when looking at the mountain top in the distance, simply could not believe we were going to climb over it). From the top we could see much of the mountain range, but unfortunately couldn’t see the Mediterranean through the fog on the horizon. The mountains are dry, so many patches are terraced and covered in dry, yellow grass, while the rest is covered in a particular green tree with leaves that absorb water from the humidity in the air, a tree I have never seen in the U.S.

A bus was supposed to pick us up at 5:30 pm on day two, but it broke down. After it was fixed, it later broke down completely. In the end we waited three and a half hours for a replacement bus. We spent the time trying to nap, playing games and singing pop songs while lounging in the shade in front of a church in one of the sleepy mountain pueblos.

Next up tomorrow (Sunday): go to a market with cheap clothes in the morning and catch the end of the Vuelta a España stage 15, which ends right in Granada.

Pictures from La Alpujarra

2007-09-15T21:08:00.000+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100050

Nerja pictures

2007-09-11T12:02:00.000+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100045

Notting Hill Carnival video

2007-09-11T11:26:00.000+02:00

I forgot to upload the video I made in iMovie about the Notting Hill Carnival in London. I uploaded it to YouTube here:

Weekend on the Beach in Nerja

2007-09-10T12:29:00.000+02:00

To take advantage of the tail end of warm summer weather, I decided to go to the beach this past weekend. If you go straight to the coast, the beaches aren’t so good, so I decided to go a bit further to Nerja, a small beach town on the Costa del Sol. A couple of friends and I emailed the rest of the students to see if others wanted to come, and before we knew it twenty of us were making the journey to swim in the Mediterranean.

First, on Thursday night, after scoring a pair of dressy, super-european, pointed-tip black shoes for 5€, I enjoyed some beverages with a bunch of friends on the lookout plaza atop the Albayzin, which overlooks the Alhambra on the other side of the valley and the city of Granada just below and to the southwest. The Alhambra at night is quite a sight: lights bathe the amber walls of the fortress. Then we descended the Albayzin and contoured around the mountain to Sacramonte, the neighborhood famous for its gypsies living in cave homes, and went to the discoteca built into a cave. Thursday nights are supposedly the craziest of the week in Granada, but there were not many people there that night, probably because the Univeristy of Granada students haven’t arrived yet. Still it was fun to see a discoteca built into a cave and experience going out till 5 am like it ain’t no thang (discos don’t start to fill up until 3 am!).

After sleeping on the late-morning bus to Nerja, I spent a lazy afternoon on the beach with two friends, Chris from UIC and Stan from U of I, with whom I shared a triple room in a hostel. Fortunately, our hostel hooked us up with all the necessary beach materials, from straw beach mats to umbrellas to boogie boards. It was exhilarating to swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea: I always imagine what history took place in this sea, e.g., how the views I am seeing are the same ones the Moors saw as they crossed the Mediterranean. I swam out to a buoy, from where I could see the dense, white buildings of Nerja framed on all sides by sharp, green mountains. ¡Qué guay! (How cool!)

View of Nerja from the mountainside where I visited the caves.

Chris, Stan and I enjoyed bocadillos we made with ingredients from the supermercado, where the baguettes on the shelves were hot off the oven, on the rooftop patio of our hostel with two friendly Welsh guys. We noticed lots of vacationers from Great Britain and Germany in Nerja, so we knew we must have picked a good town to enjoy the beach.

The next day, we three took a bus to the Nerja Caves, the largest cave in Europe. There is a concert venue inside the cave where dancing and musical performances are held. Ancient humans inhabited the caves thousands of years ago, as evidenced by primitive tools, jewelry, skulls and fascinating wall paintings. The caves are so big that it took us 45 minutes to walk through them, and there are still parts yet to be explored.

After another relaxing afternoon on the beach, we met up with the rest of the group for dinner at a seafood restaurant, where we feasted on octopus and paella brimming with prawns, mussels and calamari. Then we all went out to a British karaoke bar. I would have preferred a tapas bar full of Spaniards, but it’s hard when the girls, who outnumber guys three to one, wanted karaoke; nevertheless it was a good bonding experience with others in the group.

Back at home in Granada now, I am finding it difficult to get back into speaking and listening to Spanish after a weekend of speaking almost all English. I am looking forward to other students becoming more willing to speak Spanish so that I can feel more immersed and to spending time with some of Martha’s friends from the Canaries so that I can improve my Spanish even more.

I got to watch the Vuelta a España on TV this afternoon. It’s fun to learn some Spanish cycling vocabulary from the announcers. Right now the race is in the north of Spain, where I am thinking of visiting during my weeklong vacation for Semana Blanca. Next Sunday, the stage finishes in Granada, so I hope to catch the final sprint in downtown Granada, or wherever it occurs. Also, next weekend I am going on a hiking trip arranged by my program to Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevadas, which I am really excited for.

My Walk to School

2007-09-06T12:14:00.000+02:00

I took some pictures of my 20 minute walk to school this morning. I spend almost two hours every day walking this route to and from school in the morning, back and forth for lunch, and again at night. I wish I had a bike to cut this commute down to five minutes, but then I remind myself that I have a pretty scenic, interesting and always slightly different walk to school.http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt/100025

Class Schedule

2007-09-05T11:08:00.001+02:00

Comments on Family Life, Adjusting to the Spanish Lifestyle

2007-09-05T11:03:00.000+02:00

Living with my host parents, Obduli and Luis, is like living with grandparents you never knew. They seem to never drink coffee or alcohol. They sleep and sit around the house a lot. Luis, in fact, whenever he’s not at work always seems to be resting on the couch in just his boxers either trying to sleep or watching fútbol. Obduli sleeps in, so I usually make breakfast myself and pack a snack for when my stomach grows at noon between my second and third morning classes.
I am still getting used to the Spanish schedule. The “morning” is really long: it lasts from around 9 am till 2:30 pm, so by noon or 1 pm my stomach is growling and I am starting to bonk (i.e., run low on energy). The first day of class I didn’t brink a snack, so I could barely stay awake for my 1:20 – 2:40 pm Spanish Literature class.

After gorging on a huge lunch at 3 pm, I have a little free time before having to return to class at 4:30 pm. The “afternoon” lasts from about 4 till 8:30 pm. Then I return home for dinner, which is slightly smaller than lunch but still much bigger than breakfast, which usually consists of cereal and toasted baguette. The “evening” then lasts from 9 pm till midnight.
Internet. I don’t have wifi at home, which is why it is difficult for me to post to the blog (so I save them to my computer and post a bunch at once). Fortunately, there is wifi at school, so I often go to school early to post to the blog and check my email. It is a little strange and annoying to be so disconnected from the internet. A lot of my homework will require using the internet, so it would have been very convenient to have it at home. Alas, I’ll have to find some internet cafés nearby.
Spaniards seem to be very conscientious of conserving energy and water. They make a habit of turning off lights not being used, which makes the house very dark. Since Granada is located in such a dry environment, water conservation is important. Showers must be brief. The washing machines are tiny, and clothes are hung to dry. We drink water from the Sierra Nevada mountains, which Spaniards assure you is excellent to drink. One of my friend’s host mother, who has many, many fastidious and sometimes excessive quirks, makes him (the student) collect the cold water from the shower as it warms up so that she can use it to mop the floor or wash her hands. We think she is so fastidious, to the point of seeming crazy in modern times, because she lived in the era of Franco.
Bathrooms are interesting. Bidets, if I understand them correctly, are used to clean your butt after going number two. One of the purposes must be to conserve toilet paper; the bathroom in my house has a tiny (6x6x3 in.) waste basket for dirty toilet paper. I bet I could fill up this tiny waste basket in a day or two. I assume people use the bidet and a tiny bit of T.P. There are two small towels right next to the bidet; I hope to god these are hand towels and not post-bidet towels, because I’ve been drying my hands with them.
I am getting better at finding my way to and from school. It takes me about twenty minutes, now that I have found the most direct route possible. Whenever you walk around Granada, you always walk on the side of the street with shade. In the sun the temperature is much higher and the sun reflects off the (sometimes very shiny) floor, blinding you if you aren’t wearing sunglasses. The temperature during the hottest part of the day reaches the upper thirties Celsius, which probably is precisely why people eat lunch at take a siesta during that part of the day (2:30-5 pm).
The Andalusian accent. First, the lisp. (In Spanish, the word for lisp is “ceceo,” which is really fun to say with a lisp.) According to information I received from my program, there are three ways in which Spaniards pronounce s and z sounds: (1) pronounce z like a z; (2) pronounce z like an s; (3) pronounce both z and s with a lisp. Granada is the only city in which all three varieties exist: 55% use (1), 35% use (2), and 10% use (3).

From my experience, people pronounce soft c’s with a lisp. For example, the c is “gracias” is a soft c (i.e., it sounds like an s in normal Spanish pronunciation). Hence in Adalusia you say “grathias.”

In fact, to be a true Andalusian you would “grathia.” That’s because Anadalusians frequently drop the letter s when it is at the end of a word or precedes a consonant. For example, los niños = lo niño.

They also drop final consonants. For example, español = e’paño; Granada = Graná; hemos hablado = hemo hablao. The dropping of s’s does not impede a foreigners understanding, but sometimes the dropping of final consonants does. (It’s not always easy to tell that “Graná” comes from “Granada,” for example, but “lo niño” cannot be confused with any else but “los niños” since the singular would be “el niño.”)

Pictures from the first week in Granada

2007-09-03T18:23:00.000+02:00

http://gallery.mac.com/charliebrummitt#100023

My First Run

2007-09-02T23:14:00.000+02:00

Despite being exhausted from walking five kilometers on cobblestones and stairs in La Alhambra earlier today, I felt I needed to go for a run. I hadn’t gotten any real exercise in nine days, since I’ve been traveling, walking around foreign cities, eating, going out and sleeping (not a bad life, eh?). After an hour of drifting in and out of sleep, I put on my running shoes and iPod shuffle and began to run.

Those first few minutes were exhilarating. Here I am living in a foreign city, running around on my own with my apartment keys tightly grasped in one hand. It was a strange feeling. I finally felt settled in, as true a resident of Granada as those I passed on the sidewalk.

Where do I go? How about east? I thought, so eastward I wandered. I remember passing earlier a green building next to el Río Genil called El Congreso, which hosts conferences and has a bunch of steps, so I ran there and climbed the steps a few times.

Then I decided to wander further westward to a part of the city I haven’t been to yet. I passed all kinds of people, from old people shuffling along to groups of teenagers doing tricks on rollerblades. Whenever I saw a biker (and there are many), I began to run in the direction he was coming from, curious to find the roads and mountain trails he is returning from. This eventually led me to walking and biking paths on either side of el Río Genil, where lots of people were out walking, running and biking as the sun was rapidly crashing toward the horizon. Lots of people were walking their dogs, none of which were on leashes.

Even though it was seven or eight o’clock in the evening, it was a warm 29 degrees Celsius (which I don’t even want to convert to Fahrenheit), so I was sweating buckets. I ran so far east that I was starting to climb into the Sierra Nevada mountains, and I could no longer see the city of Granada. So cool! I saw some dirt paths leading up some of the mountains, so I’d like to return to conquer those. I returned just as the sun set, took a cold shower and ate a mountain of pasta, salad with oil and vinegar, baguette, and yogurt for dessert.

Classes start tomorrow at 9 a.m. The older daughter, Caro, just showed me a shortcut to get to school, so now I can walk there in just ten minutes instead of fifteen. She also pointed out some other places to run (there’s a big park on the south end of the city), the science museum (where I could spend a whole day seeing stuff), and a couple of University of Granada libraries where I could study and get wifi.

Guided Tour of La Alhambra

2007-09-02T23:12:00.000+02:00

Sunday morning we all met at the famous Columbus and Isabel statue to get a guided tour of La Alhambra. I had the same excellent tour guide as the Albayzin tour, Manolo, who is knowledgeable and easy to understand. I had seen La Alhambra six years ago, but not with such expert guidance. I also got to see new places I hadn’t seen earlier.

La Alhambra is a castle and city with a three-kilometer city wall perched on a ridgeline of the Sierra Nevada mountains, which extends toward Granada’s center like a boat in a sea. The first stone laid down to build La Alhambra was in the early 1100’s A.D. by Muslims, but since then La Alhambra has evolved tremendously. Muslims expanded the palaces and city, adding more houses, an astronomical viewing tower and a summer palace for the king’s family, among other additions. Christians took over the Alhambra in the early 1500’s after the Moors were expelled in 1492. They then replaced the mosque with a cathedral, dynamited some towers, and added their own, less impressive additions to the architecture. You can easily tell which is Muslim and which is Christian: horseshoe-shaped arches for doors versus rectangular doors, intricately carved stucco walls versus bare walls, stone versus brick outer walls, Arabic messages praising Allah versus Latin messages praising the Spanish kingdom.

It was very interesting to learn about the architecture and purposes of various elements of the Alhambra. One major purpose was military defense. From one tower, we could see nearly 360 degrees around and had a perfect view of the valley where Granada resides. The twenty-four towers located along the city wall were one of three types: guarded entrances (only four), military stores for weapons or garrisons for soldiers. We saw piles of round rocks which were used for catapults. Today La Alhambra is surrounded by trees, but when it was used as a castle these were cut down so that defenders could see the attackers easily.

Another interesting aspect of the architecture was the way in which it created a sense of admiration for and deference to the king. The most famous room of La Alhambra is a court with a long pool. The second floor of the court is called the “floor of jealousy,” for this is where the women of the royal family could watch what was going on below. Suppose you are a visitor to the king on the ground level. In the area with the pool, the sun coupled with the white marble floor blind you. Then you walk into the adjacent room where the king sits in the middle with his elder sons and other government officials sitting on either side. First, the room is very dark, so it takes your eyes a few seconds to adjust; meanwhile the king can look you over and decide whether to talk with you. Second, behind the king is a porous wall, so all you can see is a silhouette of the king. This is just one example of how everything in La Alhambra is constructed with a purpose.

Today La Alhambra is open to the public for daily tours. Over three hundred gardeners maintain the acres of hedges, flowers and gardens. A palace surrounded by a garden has been converted to a luxurious hotel, where we were recommended to get a coffee. I want to return at night when there is a full moon; there are fewer tourists, and I am told that it feels just like it did several hundred years ago inside. There is also a modern concert stage within the city walls where some of the best dancers in the world perform.

Moving In With The Host Family

2007-09-01T23:11:00.000+02:00

I met my host mother, Obdulia, in the lobby of our hostel this morning. She’s a short, fifty-five year old lady who has hosted several students before (she hosts one every semester). As we rode the bus back to their house on the south side of the city, she spoke clearly and slowly – and I was able to understand everything! I have already seen much improvement in my Spanish, which is really exciting for me. I also find it fun to speak in Spanish now; it still takes considerable effort, but I can string together some pretty awesome sentences.

Their second floor apartment contains four bedrooms (master, one per daughter, and mine), a small kitchen, a dining/TV room, and a bathroom (with a ceiling flusher and a wastebasket for dirty toilet paper). The apartment forms a big L, and combined with the other apartments in the building, the L-shaped apartments form an open-air corridor in the middle where people hang clothes to dry.

After getting a tour of the apartment and settling into my room (finally, no more living out of a suitcase!), I went with Obdulia to the supermercado, which was just a couple of minutes walk away. Everyone seems to own a grocery cart, which sort of resembles a golf bag, to transport groceries back to their apartment. They are very conscientious of energy and water use here (especially water because it’s so dry here).

The older daughter, Caro (short for Carolina), is home with her husband, Manolo, on vacation. They just returned from a trip to Budapest and Prague, where they didn’t like the food (they far prefer the Mediterranean diet). Manolo is a soft-spoken high school math teacher who likes motorcycle racing (and some bicycle racing, I learned). Caro is really nice and easy to understand. She gave me some good advice about finding my way back home (I live right near the intersection of a major river and a major street) and being careful about the crazy moped and motorcycle riders (of which there are tons here).

The younger daughter, Ana María, apparently does not live at home anymore like the family description had said. She lives in León, a small town in the north of Spain, where she practices medicine. The father, Luis, is the final member of the family, and his job has something to do with helping others find work.

For our first meal, Obdulia made an excellent paella with tiny shrimp (the shells of which were really hard to remove), little oysters and chicken, along with salad and watermelon. Obdulia likes to cook (¡gracias a Dios!), so I hope to learn a thing or two from her. When I told her I like to cook, she said someday I’ll have to cook a typical American meal for them (oh boy… so much pressure).

There is a gimnasio (gym or fitness club) just down the street that costs around 80 euros for a semester, which sounds like a good deal. Obdulia said it would be hard to find a bike and to find a place to park it, for there isn’t room to store it in the apartment.

Arrival in Granada

2007-08-30T23:10:00.000+02:00

I arrived at the hostel where the students stay for a few days of orientation at 9:30 pm on Wednesday night. Oddly, the lady at the desk knew exactly who I was. It turns out I came a day late; we were supposed to arrive in Granada on Tuesday, not Wednesday, so I missed the first day of orientation on Wednesday. Not only that, I missed the other students by about twenty minutes, for when I arrived at the hostel my room was empty since all the other students had gone out to tapas bars together. So I wandered around town, ate a bocadillo and worked on my pictures and movies from London.

The next day I started to finally meet the other students. I was “that guy” who came late. I found out I didn’t miss much in that first day of orientation, and I was able to catch up on the vital information from the other students. Also, four students cannot come until next week because of visa problems, so I guess I’m not the last one to arrive.

On Thursday we had academic orientation at our school Cegrí, had free time to find lunch and do whatever (I shopped and took a nap), and then got a tour of the Albayzin, the old district on the hill facing the Alhambra that is famous for its Muslim origins. It was interesting to learn about the way the Muslims lived when they resided in Granada from 711 to 1492 A.D. They stored and distributed water in large brick or stone containers with a small metal door called aljibes. There are glorified communal bathrooms that anybody in the neighborhood could use, one of which is still in use and open to the public today. Remnants of the old city walls testify to the warfare they engaged in; entrances through the wall, for example, consist of a small hallway with slanted floors and a 90-degree turn so as to give the defender an advantage in stabbing the intruder.

We also got to see the adjacent district called Sacromonte, which is famous for its gypsy homes built into caves. The temperature in these casas de cuevas is cooler during the summer and warmer in the winter. Our tour guide recommended us to come check out the bars and one discothèque in Sacromonte sometime, but he advised us to wear closed shoes in case we must run and to not drink the alcohol (but instead bottled beer) because the alcohol served there is sometimes bought from the black market. Fun!

After the tour I approached a few middle-aged mountain bikers who were drinking a post-ride espresso downtown. I have seen TONS of bikers in Granada, both mountain and road (but more mountain), both commuters and guys in jerseys and muscular, shaved legs. They told me about a local bike shop that is one of their sponsors, pointed out a road biker passing us who is a professional on some Granada team, and explained how amazing the trails and roads are near Granada. I asked where they went on the ride they just finished: “We started climbing up the road to the Alhambra and then rode the trails in the Sierra Nevadas near there.” Ahhhhh I AM SO JEALOUS! They also told me that the Vuelta A España (the Spanish equivalent of the Tour de France) goes right by Granada. On September 12th the peloton rides through a town called Monachil (or something like that) that is ten minutes away from Granada, where they climb an 18% grade road (!!!). I’ll have to go watch!

Thursday night I went with three other students to a restaurant near the Albayzin, where I ate my best Spanish meal so far: sangria plus pickled olives and garlic to start, a tabla combinada consisting of various slices of sausage, ham, pate, and cheese, and finally vegetable paella. We four shared all of these dishes, which made it a fun and social dinner, and despite it tasting like a $40 meal it only cost us 8 euros each!

After that we met up with other students at a few other tapas bars. Each time you order a drink, you get a free tapa (normally around 3 euros). The great part about this lower Albayzin area is that to get from one tapa bar to another you have to walk maybe 10 steps. Also, every restaurant we went to was full of Spaniards (and this was a Thursday night). The atmosphere in these tapas bars is cheerful, laid back and sociable. The Spaniards sure know how to eat well and enjoy the night.

Friday morning we had orientation on housing, and I found out that I was among three students whose host families had changed. They didn’t tell us the reason why, but that usually the reason a family has to bow out is because of a sickness in the family in which the grandmother, or whoever is sick, must take the empty bed in the house. My new family is:

Sra. Obdulia Pérez Utrabo
Calle Maestro Lecuono, 6 - 2°C (second floor, letter C)
18004 Granada
Tel.: (+34) 958 – 52 28 30

Mrs. Perez lives with her husband, who is a commercial agent, and one of her two daughters, who is 24 years old and has finished her medicine studies. The other daughter lives and works in Málaga and visits them during the weekends. They like going out and the movies. They are a sociable, organized and active family.

It sounds like a great family, and their home is in a better location than the previous one.

I have had a lot of fun wandering around on my own, stumbling upon cool cathedrals and markets and gardens, shopping for the rebajas that occur in the end of August (once again, didn’t buy anything), and making my own bocadillo from a supermercado for cheap. Today I my bocadillo consisted of a 0.38 euro mini baguette, a few slices of the best Serrano ham and a few thick slices of sheep’s cheese – all four 2 euros total. God I love Spanish food.

Tonight we have our opening banquet dinner at a restaurant. I’m not sure how we are going to fit us 40-some students into a restaurant (I haven’t seen any that are large enough!). The other students – who are all from Wisconsin, Illinois or UIC – seem like a lot of fun. I am happy that many seem open-minded and adventurous. It should be a great semester.

Tour de Madrid

2007-08-29T23:08:00.000+02:00

Julio, his father (also Julio – in their house they call young Julio “Julio Alberto” to differentiate), and Carlos, a friend of Julio from school, picked me up at Barajas, Madrid’s airport, around noon. On just four hours of sleep, I put on my “game face” and tried very hard to understand their Spanish. Julio’s dad was very good about speaking slowly and clearly to him, so understood nearly everything he said. Julio, on the other hand, was much more difficult to understand because he would often mumble the words together.

In the family Fiat sedan, Julio Señor dropped us three kids off at a metro stop in the city, where two more friends (a guy and girl couple whose names escaped my tired mind) joined us. Then we began the grand tour of the city. By walking and using the metro, we traveled all around Madrid and saw nearly every famous site: La Plaza del Sol, La Plaza Mayor, el Palacio Real, el Parque Retiro (Madrid’s Central Park), several famous statues and arches, and other places whose names I cannot recall. I had seen many of these sites before on my two trips to Madrid, but some were new to me. The weather was hot (high 80’s), and there were few clouds to shield us from the merciless sun. Fortunately, unlike in Wisconsin the air is dry. The resulting yellow grass and beige cement gives the city a yellow tone.

Me in la Plaza Mayor.

We ate lunch downtown at a 10-euro buffet, where I sampled the gazpacho and flan. It was fun to converse with Julio and his friends about Spanish culture. When they spoke slowly to me I could understand some, but when they spoke to each other in their natural rhythm I felt lucky to simply pick out words I knew. Right now I feel I’m better at speaking than listening (which does not say a lot for my listening skills) because I can speak at my own pace and use only the words that I know. I am especially good at conjugating common verbs such as to eat, think, go, etc., but sometimes I have to pause to think about the irregulars. The other reason I’m better at speaking is if I don’t know a word, I can use circumlocution (i.e., explain the word with words I do know), but I can’t always do that when listening, for their explanation may introduce new words I don’t know.

Interesting map depicting the first exploration trips by Columbus. The bottom track stopped in the Canary Islands. On the left you can see Haiti, Cuba, etc., while on the right is Spain.

That night, after I dozed off to sleep during the hour-long commute by metro and bus to Majadahonda, the city just outside of Madrid where Julio lives, I ate dinner with Julio’s family. The caffeine from a coke allowed me to muster the energy and focus to converse over the dinner table. We ate a classic Spanish meal of little squids, bread with tomato, olive oil and garlic, and ensalada rusa, a mayonnaise-based salad of peas, tuna, egg, and other goodies. Julio’s parents were very nice, interested in me and life in the U.S., and willing to speak slowly. They kindly offered for me to come back to visit some weekend this semester and even to spend Christmas with them, but unfortunately I already had plans of spending Christmas in Venice with Nina’s family.

Julio lives in a beautiful hardwood-floor apartment in a town of sixty thousand (or seventy, who knows, the two words sound very similar). They have a maid that cleans and I think cooks, too.

That night, Julio left to see a movie with some friends, but I stayed home because I was so tired and so that I could work on writing to the blog and organizing pictures. I didn’t go to bed till midnight, after which I slept till noon the next day. Julio slept that late, too, so I didn’t feel so bad, but Esperanza, Julio’s mom, later told me she waited and waited for us to wake up so that she could take a shower without disturbing us – whoops.

The next day I accompanied Julio as he walked around town doing a couple of errands, and then we ate a lunch of cooked artichoke hearts, fried fish (the name of which wasn’t in their Spanish-English dictionary) and a baguette, with watermelon for dessert. Then the two Julios, father and son, drove me to the bus station downtown, where I boarded a 5 pm bus to Granada, on which I am typing this blog post right now. I hope to return to Madrid sometime this semester to visit Julio’s family again, with the ability to spew out smooth Spanish, an ear for the language and hair dyed blonde by the Granada sun.

London pictures

2007-08-29T12:52:00.000+02:00

I uploaded the London pictures to my .Mac Web Gallery here. Last night I added comments to each photo explaining what was in it, but unfortunately they were lost when I uploaded them. I'm just starting to go through the photos again and add the comments. I'm also considering using other services such as flickr, so stay tuned.

UPDATE: The comments on the photos are all back up.

Day Two in London

2007-08-28T23:28:00.000+02:00

I got a late start on the day because I slept in till 10:30 am and didn’t leave the house till 1 pm, but that didn’t stop me from seeing as many London sights as possible. After meeting Alan’s daughter, Natalie, she, Van Anh and I took the train to Waterloo station, had an exquisite Italian lunch and then hit the shops. Naturally, they went to women’s shops, so we split up. I had borrowed Alan’s cell phone for the day so that I could try to meet up with a Red Arrow friend and fellow counselor of mine, Pablo, who was visiting London at the same time.

After an hour of shopping, Natalie and Van Anh left to go home, so I decided to wander around London on my own for a while. I was waiting to get a call from Pablo so that we could meet up, so in the meantime I went to see as many famous sites as possible: the Tower of London (a big castle in the city where King Henry VIII, among others, lived), Tower Bridge, the House of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Ministry of Defense. It was fun to variously walk, jog and ride the Tube (the name of London’s subway) around the city in an effort to see as much as possible in a short amount of time.

Once I stumbled upon Piccadilly Circus again, I knew where I was. I decided to return to the Notting Hill Carnival, for I heard that Sunday’s festivities are for the kids, while Monday’s are for the adults. To be honest the difference did not seem profound, although it was fun to see more parts of the carnival. Pablo called me at seven from a public phone, but we were never able to meet up that night.

I returned to Alan’s house by the Tube and train, which all had become familiar to me by now. Alan and I drank a cup of tea late that night and watched a British comedy show that depicts an awkward, backward town in northern England. (The accent was so strong I often had to read the subtitles.) Alan is a kid at heart: he loved to share his music (he has current tastes) and British comedians with me. Unfortunately, while my body yearned for sleep that night, the tea kept my eyes perky till the wee hours of the morning. With just four hours of sleep, I left early for Heathrow to board a train to Madrid. These were my last moments in an English-speaking land for months. Ahora, me dije, tengo que hablar, pensar, sonar, todo en español. (Now, I told myself, I have to speak, think, dream, everything in Spanish.)

Here goes.

So This Is London

2007-08-27T13:22:00.000+02:00

I arrived at Heathrow airport at 6:20 am Sunday morning a bit groggy (it was 12:20 am for me) but high on the adrenaline rush that you get when you visit a new country. There’s something special about those first few minutes in a foreign place when you haven’t traveled in a while: I look at a piece of cement on the runway, for example, and think, Aha! That’s British cement! And British grass over there! So this is London.

I ran into my first “adventure” of my six-month journey just ten minutes after landing. My plan was to meet Alan Walker, a friend of my mom’s who lives in London, at the airport and stay with him for a couple of days. However, I realized that I did not have his phone number or address. This became an issue at the immigration desk, for they require either an address or phone number for where you are going to stay. After a few minutes I was able to convince the lady that I wasn’t going to be a beggar in London, or whatever her fear was. The student visa finally convinced her I was legit.

My next task was to find Alan. Thing is, I didn’t even know what he looks like! I got my baggage, no Alan there. I left the airport and walked slowly past the crowd of people holding up signs with people’s names on them, wondering if I’d see a sign bearing my name. Still no Alan. I slowly walked around a bit more, trying to look as confused as possible to let him know I’m looking for him. Fortunately, Sam had stayed with Alan two years ago, so he knew what I would look like. Sure enough, he found me after a couple of minutes. Phew.

After throwing my bags in his car, I instinctively started walking to the right side to get in what I thought would be the passenger seat. “Oh, so you’re going to drive?” quips Alan. He zipped me along the left hand side of the road and around roundabouts to his house on the southwest side of London, where I met his Vietnamese fiancée, Van Anh (pronounced VAHN ANG). She’s a fun hotel owner who loves to shop and always has a big smile.

After a glass of Van Anh’s deliciously sweet, iced Vietnamese coffee and some toast and bacon, the three of us headed to the city. After a twenty minute train ride through London suburbs, where the classic roofs look like they’re straight out of Mary Poppins, we arrived at Waterloo train station, where there’s a big clock that’s a popular meeting place for lovers both in real life and in movies.

We walked over the Thames river, where I got my first view of some of the famous sites in London. Apparently for the first time in weeks, the skies over London stayed clear of rain that day (poor Londoners!). The good weather, coupled with the fact that it was a three-day weekend because of the bank holiday on Monday, meant that the streets and cafés were crowded. We boarded one of those classic red, double-decker buses to whisk us to Camden market, a popular shopping area with lots of character (it’s where the “freaks come out,” jokes Alan, referring to all the Goths, gays, and other extravagantly expressed characters who stroll those shops). Picture an open air shopping mall with small boutique stores – no Walmarts here – with meandering, cobblestone pathways crossing over canals. My favorite store was Cyber Dog, which sells outrageous rave attire, such as shirts with changing LED lights and bright neon outfits that look like they’re for a dance party in outer space. The music in the store? Pounding dance beats, of course.

The British, I soon began to realize, are very expressive with their clothing. Alan’s weekend attire, which he told me was typical for him, consisted of a stylish dress shirt and some fancy jeans and leather shoes. Nearly every Londoner was either nicely dressed like Alan, or dressed in some other style, such as all-black clothes with spiky hair, tatoos and earrings. Not a sweatshirt in sight.

After grabbing a bite to eat at a Vietnamese food stand (Van Anh assured us it was definitely not authentic), we took red double-decker buses to Notting Hill to see the carnival. The festival sprawls across a wide area of upscale housing in western London and celebrates the large population of Caribbean immigrants in the UK. A procession of floats and flamboyantly dressed dancers slowly meanders through thick crowds in a big circle around the Notting Hill area. Inside the circle, crowds fill the streets at food stands (lots of jerk chicken) and dance parties on the streets. Some streets have DJ’s spinning dance beats, while others blast reggae out of loudspeakers so loud your chest thumps to the beat. We walked around for an hour and saw what was probably only a tiny fraction of all the festivities.

By 5 pm, jetlag was catching up to me, which was quickly cured by a cappuccino. Because of the unusually great weather, Alan, Van Anh and I, along with half of London it seemed, decided to have a picnic in a big park near the carnival. We chatted about our British genealogies and British slang, my favorite of which is cockney rhyming slang: Londoners rhyme phrases with certain words, and substitute the first word of the phrase for the word. For example, apples means stairs (apples and pairs – stairs), frog means road (frog and toad – road). “I’m going to get my Barnet done” means “I’m going to get my hair done” (Barnet fair – hair). I had never heard of this clever rhyme slang before.

It was seven o’clock, but there were sites to see and a long night ahead. We took a bus to Oxford square, a popular shopping area, where we had a pint of lukewarm beer at a pub and struck conversation with four motorsport-loving, beer drinking mates. As the sun set, we meandered through China town, Picadilly circus (London’s equivalent of Time Square), and the theatre district, where we stopped for another drink at a small French bar that attracts an artsy crowd.

By the time we got home, I was crashing hard due to jet lag and passed out easily on Alan’s son’s, Ben’s, bed. (British bed covers are funny; it’s like slipping into a taco.) I expected to sleep eight or nine hours, for I didn’t want to miss out on the short time I had to see London. Eleven hours of sleep later, I awoke still dead tired from jetlag, but that’s nothing that strong English tea can’t cure.

Dates and plans

2007-08-18T01:05:00.000+02:00

I fly from Chicago to London on Saturday, August 25th, where I will spend two full days. As it turns out, one of the largest street festivals in Europe occurs during the exact two days while I'm there: the Notting Hill Carnival. I think it will be like the Mardi Gras of London.

On Tuesday, August 28th I fly to Madrid, where I'll spend a night and then catch a bus to Granada. (Oddly, traveling by bus to Granada costs less and is faster than traveling by train.) After a few days of orientation, I'll move in with my host family on September 1, and classes begin Monday, September 3rd.

I will have a week-long break in October called Semana Blanca (approx. October 6-15) and national holidays on Nov. 2, Dec. 7 and 8 (approx.). My final exams finish December 13, and my last day of paid housing will be a few days later (Dec. 16). After that I'll travel around for a month; my only reservation is a flight on January 15th from Paris.

My host family

2007-08-14T22:08:00.000+02:00

I just found out who my host family is:

Sra. Ana María Rodríguez Peinado
Calle Prado Llano, 6
Bola de Oro
18008 Granada

Mrs. Rodríguez lives with her 23 year old son, who is studying to become a fireman, and her 33 year old son, who is a policeman. She has got another son who is married already and lives close to Granada, he and his family visit her quite often. She is an agreeable and communicative lady. She likes crafts and sewing and used to work as a masseuse. They have a cat at home.

Masseuse eh? How do you say "massage me" in Spanish? (FYI: ¡Masajéame!) Also, I should be very safe while in Spain: If I ever get mugged or light on fire, I'll just call my policía or bombero brother.

Here's where my house (apartment?) is on a map.

Here's my 2.6 km commute to school.

My new home (look for the little green arrow):