Fast Trains and McFlurries

Life in Madrid continues as usual. The high school level drama keeps rearing its ugly head. Its like an episode of degrassi here sometimes. I was lucky enough to miss most of the drama going down this past weekend on my holiday to Sevilla, which was just as amazing as I had remembered it. We ate McDonnalds ice cream everyday down by the river because it was so warm in Sevilla and it the ice cream was so delicious and cheap.

The Excursion
Friday:
After only sleeping one hour Thursday night/Friday morning (I went to a indie/brit-pop dance club and stayed up dancing and listening to music until 6:30am. So much fun. We’re going back this weekend for the yeah yeah yeah’s cd release party.) I met Adriana at the train station at 8:45. I literally spent less than half an hour packing my things and only forgot one thing I needed- my camera charger. We boarded the Alteria train for Sevilla in a part of the station that was more like an airport than a train station. It worked as the train ride was more like a flight. They even handed out headphones to watch a movie. It was rather interesting watching Deborah Messing with a Spanish voice dubbed over.

Anyway, when we finally got into Sevilla we had no plans at all. All we had was our trusty lonely planet to guide us. WE decided to just chance it and take the first bus that would drop us off in the center of the city. It was happenstance that it dropped us off in front of one of the hostels listed in the lp. The hostel, Hostel Pino, was absolutely adorable. We were showed to a very spacious and clean double room on the roof of the building with a view of the cathedral. The only setback was the lack of hot running water on our floor. I took a short siesta and then we hit the town. It was so much fun to find things that I vaguely remembered. I’m sure Adriana got sick of me saying, “I ate lunch here” or “I have a picture of this!!!” But that probably wasn’t half as annoying as the random spouts of architectural commentary “more flying buttresses and barrel vaults. Yes!!!” We called it an early night after and fell asleep to Spanish tv.


Saturday:
Woke up early and refreshed and ready to feast on our bananas, peanut butter and rice cakes (our food staples in Sevilla). After café con leche at a small café across the street from the hostel we did some window shopping (and actuall shopping… shhh) and then got lost in the Alcazar and climbed to the top of the minaret at the cathedral. Both sites were absolutely beautiful and I used up all the battery power my camera had left capturing them. More wandering commenced after a lunch of pb and banana sandwiches and McDonalds ice cream. And so we wouldn’t spend too much money eating tapas for dinner, we ate more rice cakes and bananas and drank cheap corte ingles champagne with some guys from Denmark staying at our hostel.
(hedge maze at the alcazar. i' ve decided that i'm going to write a book on called "hedge mazes of western europe")

(look i'm a statue)

As if we hadn’t had a perfect day already, we met up with Camille for tapas. It was great to hear that she’s feeling some of the same things we are here in Madrid and to see a familiar face. The tapas were great, as was the sangria. Then we did something I hadn’t in Sevilla before. We crossed the river(!) and met up with Camille’s friend Ken and his cousin and her Spanish boyfriend. A few more people came over and we all had a great time preparing to go out dancing. They took us to a club called Buddha, which featured 3 floors of dancing and no cover charge. It was so much fun but I had to call it a night at 4am. I was just too tired to go on any longer. It looked like the guys at our hostel had a similar night, as they hadn’t bothered turning off the light in their room or closing the door.

(the other side of the river!)

Sunday:
Slept in more than we thought due to the time change. Ate our usual breakfast and chatted with our hostel neighbors some more before checking out and heading to the train station. I was reluctant to say goodbye to Sevilla but was also happy to be returning to Madrid… OR SO I THOUGHT

Al trains to Madrid were sold out. We schlepped our things to the bus station to get a bus ride which would take twice as long but would still get us to Madrid by morning. SOLD OUT! So it was back to the hostel to book another night and then to the train station to book a ticket to Madrid for Monday morning. SOLD OUT! We ended up getting the Ave (Sevilla to Madrid in 2 hours) back to Madrid and making it to one of our 3 classes.

We had a good time being stranded in Madrid after everything was taken care of. WE had dinner with Alan, Rasmus, and Chris (the guys from Denmark) and their friend Kristine (also from Denmark but studying in Sevilla). Adriana slept under the starts and got rained one while I slept as much of a good night’s sleep as I could and was cozy and warm.

(view of the hostel we returned to)

Monday:
Came back to Madrid and went directly to Getafe for class. There I encountered everything as I had left it. It was good to be home, even if home smelled bad and was cold and gray.

Vacaciones: Valencia y Valle de los Caidos

So I’ve been keeping myself busy. As have been my friends. It’s a wonder I’m still alive after the weekend I had.

Every year Valencia has a huge festival called Las Fallas. Each neighborhood in Valencia makes a huge float out of foam, wood, and paper maché. After a week of partying and displaying the floats, they burn them all. Kids run through the streets with firecrackers scaring the shit out of every sane individual. For some reason, my friends and I decided that it would be fun to go to this festival with the Erasmus group. We left at 8:30 Saturday morning for a 4.5-hour bus ride to Valencia and returned to Madrid on the same bus the following morning at 9:30. So basically I pulled an allnighter louder and more potent than any I’ve ever pulled in Wurster with millions of really dunk and rude people (we overhead a group of older Spanish women talking smack about us because we were American but were too tired to respond). Its no wonder I woke up Monday morning sick as a dog.

That being said, I’m glad I went to Valencia. The floats were absolutely stunning and the city itself was beautiful. It was so surreal to see fireworks hovering precariously close to buildings and to hear them echo through the streets.





My favorite part of the trip- hands down- was going to the beach. Or should I say the sea, the Mediterranean Sea.

After 2 hours of wandering around Valencia we finally made it to the water. And although it was cold and gray, I still ran to the water and waded in up to my knees. I swear I was drying out. It had been over a month since I had seen a proper salty body of water. I’ve lived all my life within a mile of the ocean. Even though I don’t go to the beach all the time, just having the ocean nearby is enough. Its presence calms me. The sand. The salt. The waves.

Being so close to the Mediterranean Sea meant good seafood. At one of the many overcrowded cafes with rude waiters I mead Emi, Adriana, and Matt eat black rice with me. Black rice is a specialty of the area. Its rice, squid, a white sauce, and squid ink. It looks absolutely disgusting, but it was one of the best meals I’ve had in Spain. I highly recommend it.


The day before the Valencia trip Adriana, Emi, and I visited another city near Madrid. El Escorial. Its home to a huge royal monastery and the tombs of all the former kings/queens of Spain. Doesn’t sound too interesting, but it was. After a few hours of gawking at the Romanesque monastery and cathedral, we took a short bus trip over to Valle de los Caidos. Its basiclly a huge monument to Franco. He had it built by the Spanish civil war prisoners and is buried inside. Technically, it’s a monument for all those who died in the civil war. But really it’s a huge We Love Franco! cross and cathedral built into the hillside. And as we noted, its rather fitting that Franco’s monument to himself is falling apart. There were leaks and cracks everywhere.

We got soaked in the rain but I don’t think I’d want to see el Valle de los Caidos any other way.

Anything else exciting? I made cookies the other night for a dinner party. It was rather hard to do with the conversions and different ingredients and lack of chocolate chips. They tasted a bit odd, but were a hit regardless. I went to Kapital (7 story discoteca) again, still not my scene but I had more fun than last time. I continue to go out/do something every night. Last night it was gelato and an irish pub with a Brit, 2 Swiss girls, a guy from Holland, another from France, a French Canadian and 2 Americans. The conversations going around the table were rather interesting. My favorite was the discussion of milk- should it be served cold/room-temp/warm. All the people form North American agreed that cold was the correct answer.

This weekend Adriana and I are headed to Sevilla. I’m almost as excited to go back there as I am to go to Greece. Semana Santa is coming up so soon!

Madrid & Its Neighbors

(this picture pretty much sums up the past week here)

MADRID

I’ve been in Madrid for a month and 2 days now. I can’t believe its been that long. And at the same time, I feel like I’m running out of time here and that I’ve wasted precious weekends by staying in Madrid and not traveling. From now on, Adriana and I will be leavning the city every weekend. This weekend we hit up Toledo and Segovia. Next weekend we’re going to Valencia for Las Fallas.

So this past week has been hectic for no good reason. I’ve been out just about every night this week, including Monday. I guess that’s what happens when you start making friends. Mind you, all of my friends are from the States or England. All the Spaniards in my classes and around the campus are really cliquey. They never even attempt to start up a conversation with us. No one even talks to me in my mini-curso where there are only 14 other students. Not because I’m amaerican, they don’t know that yet because I’ve yet to open my mouth in class, but because they only talk to the 2 other people they signed up for the class with. Maybe I’m so used to having my friends in classes with me, but I feel like there isn’t as much of the exclusion and cliqueiness back home in Berkeley.

Anyway- back to the good parts of my week. Monday night we went out for post-school drinks and I didn’t get home until 1:30 in the morning. And the rest of the school week followed suit. Wednesday night Chris was yelled at by an angry Madrilleno. Thursday night there was some discotecca action but I was more excited by the karaoke section of the club than the dance floor. Friday night was a flat-party hosted my the wonderful Zarlashta Christiana and Emma. I made friends with more students from Carlos III (again- all English). The most interest thing about the party was the fact that the only Americans there were Cal students (except for the couple visiting from Barcelona). I don’t know what that means…

I had an absolutely amazing weekend. Madrid is still not a city I love, but I’m warming up to it. In fact, I defended the hell out of it when Adriana and Emi made some negative comments about it. Sure Madrid isn’t as beautiful as the cities in Andalucia. Sure the people here are rude. But once you get past the few setbacks, you can enjoy it a whole lot more. You just have to put yourself out there- cliché, I know, but so true. Madrid has a lot to offer, it’s just not as obvious as in other places. The culture shock tends to obscure the treasures.

A few treasures:

Playing Uno in a sangria bar hidden underground.

-Taking a picture of the police, watching them get out of their car to get angry at us, and having to delete said picture
Kinder-eggs and the toys hidden inside
The sandwich shop in Getafe

Sunsets over the park

THE NEIGHBORS

Toledo is impossible to navigate, so we just wandered around the entire day. We (meaning Adriana, Daniel and myself) somehow managed to see a great deal of the city and discovered some interesting vistas and plazas. It ended up being a very chill day filled with tiny cafes, el Greco painting, and laying down on a cliff overlooking the hillside below. It’s a good thing we walked around a lot otherwise I would have felt bad about eating all those marzipans (a specialty in Toledo). We also trespassed into an art school without knowing it. A teacher there spotted me looking lost and confused through the courtyard and, very kindly, led me out to the street adn pointed me in the direction of the church I was looking for. I claimed that I was alone as Adriana and Dan walked into a closed exhibition and pissed off a tempermental artist. I heard the artist whining about them on my way out and immediately called Adriana once the coast was clear, urging her to make a quick escape.

In Segovia we (Adriana and I) met up with Santiago for all of 2 minutes. Adriana and I hugged the aqueduct a few times as we were so inspired by its historical significance. I was so excited by the gothic cathedral, my brain hurt and I couldn’t stop pointing out the ribbed barrel vaults and flying-buttresses or force the image of my arch history professor doing the gothic architecture dance. And when we were through with the city, we took the bus back to Madrid. What a beautiful drive!

Cordoba and Granada- EAP Weekend Excursion

Put 65 university students on a bus and rest assured that they will revert to 13-year-olds (or younger) before anyone can say “are we there yet” or “I have to peeeeeeeee”

Our bus met outside my Dunkin Donuts at 8:15 Friday morning. And although I didn’t go out Thursday night, I was exhausted and had barely slept the night before. Its unfortunate that the other students didn’t share my paranoia. Had they, they would have a)been on time b)had time to grab a dozen donuts and c)snag one of the 2 tables on the 2-story monster of a bus we inhabited for the weekend.

We drove for hours through the seemingly never-ending flatlands and past windmills for hours before our bathroom stop. Being at the front of the bus, we were able to beat everyone to the restrooms and take our time while everyone else danced from foot to foot outside in the line. Bladders happy, it was time to satisfy our bellies. I forgot to ask my family to pack me a lunch and so I watched everyone else open their packs to see what their señoras had sent them. Katie game me part of her sandwich. Emi and Adriana traded juice boxes and then we all had a wonderful dessert of cookies and donuts. By the time we made it Cordoba we were had stored up enough energy to trade assigned roommates so everyone could be with their friend. Unfortunately, I have 2 friends so we had to work around the double room situation a bit. Adriana and Emi were hooked up with a sweet corner room with a closet large enough to make the room suitable as a triple. So we dragged my bedding, towel and mattress through the halls of the hotel so I could set up camp in my room/closet.

The ruins in the stairway under the glass floor were not enough antiquities to view that day so we headed across the street from the hotel to the Great Mosque. I couldn’t stand listening to my tourguide and so opted for my very own self-guided tour. After writing a 12 page paper on the mosque, I felt as though I was qualified to do so. I was like a little kid in a candy store. It just made me so sad to see the catholic capilla in the middle of the forest of columns. And while I tried to ignore it altogether, I was just too excited to see the gothic barrel vaults to look away.

(Megan loves thousand year old columns!)

Later that night we got lost in the tiny streets while looking for a good place to have dinner. We ate pizza and some local specialties and talked to our waiter about absinthe over a glass of wine. Then we saw a flamenco show and went to bad.

If I’ve learned anything form my large group tour experiences, its that you should always go to breakfast early. NO MATTER WHAT!!!! The breakfast spread in Cordoba was amazing and we ended up swiping some fruit and yogurt for the busride to Granada. We comfortably enjoyed our meals while others had to fight pushy tour groups of senior citizens for tables and scrambled eggs.

Granada was much like Cordoba in the fact that everywhere I walked it was like I was walking through a dream. Every corner we turned (in the huge mass of loud Californian students- ugh) sparked some memory. It was like putting together a big puzzle piece by piece without knowing what the overall picture was going to look like. We passed the restaurant where I first tried paella, the discoteca where I discovered just how much Europeans like bad American music and techno, the corner where a gypsies tried to force rosemary in my face. When we finally ditched the group, my feet knew exactly how to get me where I wanted to go.

(me, Emi, Adriana, and Fernando near my replacement saucer store)

We went on a quest through the rain that night to find me a replacement saucer for the one I bought 4 years ago that broke when I got it home. Dashing from awning to awning we made it back to the hotel slightly damp and ready for some champagne, cider (sustainably produced at that) and dinner (provided by the program).

(Here we've discovered kinder eggs and how awesome the toys inside them are. At this point, we've become 5-year-olds)

The tent we had dinner in was identical to the tent on the beach where my high-school prom was held. Complete with the same snotty popularity contests and stupid cliques. Who are you going to sit next to? Who’s going to get stuck next to the teachers (or program directors in our case)? Who’s going to be the loner stuck sitting at a table of complete strangers? Not me. We outsides and non-clique kids stick together. Our table was actually the first to fill up as everyone else was too busy trying to figure out who to sit with.

After dinner we had a drink at the hotel bar and finished off the cider while dying our hair. I tried going out with the Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz kids but grew tired of their banal conversations and went back to watch high fidelity on my computer.

Today was spent wandering around the Alhambra which is still amazing (another part of the dream puzzle) and running franticly through the Arabic district of Granada after tea and kebaps (best I’ve had in Spain so far) to catch the bus back to Madrid. We’re driving through endless fields of olive trees now and the 5-year-old in my head is starting to scream “are we there yet?!” Sorry kid. You’re going to have to hold it for some more time.

adendum- I made it to the bathroom in time. Now I'm back home and it feels rather nice.