The Blog: On Plays, El Prado, y el Torneo Medieval

What’s up todos!

So life here is odd. Mostly because despite having a schedule, sometimes it still feels pretty disorganized. We had a big stinking exam this week, and also some fiiiield triiiips. Jessie, you are already living a field trip. How could you have a field trip within a field trip. Great question peanut gallery, lemme tellya bout it.

As far as the school days are concerned, they pass pretty quick. One of my favorite thing we do outside of school is still our intercambios. We just get to have English hour with this adorable Columbian girl and it’s so funny. Although less funny when she asks us “what is the difference between ‘joker’ and ‘clown’?” and the best I can do is draw very sloppy cartoons for her haha. Also she showed us her English homework and HOLY COW I’m SO GRATEFUL I ALREADY SPEAK ENGLISH. She was analyzing sentence structure and it was pretty much the most boring thing on the earth.

Wednesday was exam day…. I don’t want to talk about it haha. Let’s just say there have been better days. Memorizing things that don’t have a concrete timeline in your mind? Not my specialty. Especially history. Booooo. But life goes on.

On Thursday we had the COOLEST EXPERIENCE. We went to a playyyyy!! So after school we went home and had lunch with the fam, hung around and took a nap for a while, then went to the train station and headed out to Madrid. We went to see La Estrella de Sevilla (literal translation: The Star of Sevilla) and it was SO cool. Sadly, we couldn’t take pictures. But it was crazy, there were 7 actors and basically an empty stage-no real back drops or settings. The props they had were a super minimalist chair, a crown, two swords, and about 30-or-so poles. Oh yes… and the Spanish drama unfolds. It was based off of a real historical event (of course) and you can read about it here: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Estrella_de_Sevilla

This is hard to explain exactly, but I want to say real quick why I loved the play despite probably following a whopping 40% of the dialogue…the presentation. Like I said, they had these pole-vaulting sized rods that they used to create scenery. It was such an interesting minimalist way of telling a story. In between monologues the characters would each pull a pole out of the floor (the stage was set up so they would stand on their own) and then anchor them in somewhere else. They were walls, hallways, trees, entryways, torture instruments … haha. It was a great play.

The day after, we went to the Prado again but this time with Rebeca who teaches our civilization class. This lady knows her stuff, it was cool to be lead around chronologically talking about different paintings with someone I actually knew (read: not a tour guide). But three hours standing kind of killed. So afterwards we walked Madrid and went home. Megan, Kristen, Alysa and I went to see El Mercado de San Miguel which is one of the sites to see in Madrid and we hadn’t been since our first day in Spain. It’s really cool to see actual fresh-markets with fish and fruit and tapas!!! Expensive little tapas haha. BUT it’s also cool because everyone who is there is not on their phones. It’s actually a social activity. I mean of course it helps that adults go to the market to have real adult social time and not a bunch of teenagers who are their to have a social time and then publish it publicly. Haha...

So that’s that, really for what I did anyways. Oh shoot haha, I wanted to talk about the fair!!!! Aw yeahhhh

So last week for La Semana Cervantina Alcalá hosted one of Europe’s largest medieval festivals. Actually, I’m almost certain it is THE largest. And it was so great!!

The streets were covered in banners and little booths of artisans with wood crafts and necklaces and spices and ham and pastries and more jewelry and rugs and floral crowns and sweets and nuts and it was great. It made me think of the farmers market back home on Saturdays y me echaba de menos mis padres jaja.

There were a bunch of activities for the four days it was set up, but we were traveling (also: it was Sunday) so we could only go to do something on Monday. So after staying in to study all day, we went to a JOUST!!!!! I thought it was going to be a bust, but it turned out to be THE MOST FUN and I was laughing and smiling for basically two hours straight. The joust was this sweet production with real caballeros and shenanigans, it was great. We sat in the blue section so our caballero was azul but I actually think he was kind of evil haha… like a bit of a villain in their production. I took some videos so if you want to see some of it they are definitely in the process of being edited and shipped to Hollywood #jokes #amateurhourwiththesmartphoneinthefrontrow

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCSAz2rPrdM