On Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada and Halloween

Hola todos!

SO HEY from…. Well yeah, the bus.

So this weekend we went to visit the triple threat of Sevilla, Córdoba, & Granada en el sur de España. This is our last long trip (we have shorter trips following) and can I just say thus far? Totes worth. And you know all sassy comments aside about the bus, I’m amazed how fast time passes when I feel like I am sitting doing ab-so-lute-ly nothing...

So Córdoba first:

Oh wow, so Córdoba was a funny little town. When we visit little towns that are farther away we usually do it on the way to another town. IE we had a shorter time in Córdoba while on the way to Sevilla. And when we got off the bus I remember looking at Córdoba and thinking “welp….. we’ll see what this is going to be about haha. Looks like an evil little-r Toledo…. That is somehow less scenic…” annnnd-alright wait it took ALL STINKING DAY to get to Córdoba, I almost forgot. Picture this: you get up at 5:15 to get ready to run at 5:30. You finish, go home, shower, and it’s 7:00. You get dressed, pack the rest of your things, grab breakfast and your lunch your mom made for your trip, and rush off to the plaza that’s about 8 minutes down the road. You get on the bus at 8 am. And you stay on it until 1:30 in the afternoon. Can you imagine that?? I don’t have to… since that was my life on Wednesday.

I actually loved Córdoba. So in our class civilización iberico we spent a few weeks reviewing classic architecture in Spain. And it was very very very very boring. But seeing it in person? Phenomenal. And I definitely wish I payed attention more in class haha. Dang… anyway, it was so crazy. Something I wasn’t aware of when I came to Spain was the presence of middle-eastern influences. As someone who studied Spanish in the context of almost exclusively South and Central America, I didn’t know too much about 1. European geography 2. Specifics of European history. It’s not a big deal since it means I’ve learned a lot in my time here, but it didn’t make sense why 1. There are no Mexican restaurants and 2. Every big city seems to have at least a half dozen kebab shops, among other things that aren’t related to food haha. I asked this to Sonia and she throws her hands up in the air and says something to the effect of why would we want to have Mexican food here?? This is Spain! In America, you’re right next to Mexico, yes? So you have a lot of Mexican restaurants. In Spain, it’s the same with middle eastern restaurants like the kebab shops. We’re not going to have Mexican food here, it’s allllll the way on the other side of the ocean, there’s no reason we should have it here. So... I really miss tacos haha. ANYWAYS WHAT I WAS TRYING TO GET AT: In Spain, a lot of the history -in a very very blanket statement over a few thousands of years- is between three groups: the catholics, the jews, and the muslims. So there are a lot of catedrales, sinagogues, y mosques depending on what part of the country you’re in, despite the majority of Spain being catholic.  So we went to see the mosque in Córdoba and it was incredible and so different from every thing else we’ve visited. Totally worth it. If you can stomach all of the tourist shops with the arches and potted plant tshirts.

When we got back on the bus we went to fnd the hotel in Sevilla. I’m still not sure how to spell it because in English I think it’s Seville, and in Spanish Sevilla (seh-bee-ya). I was hecka hungry so Alyssa, Rachel, Megan, and I decided to hunt out some food and decided to go to this Italian restaurant. And I died. I DIED. Have you ever had real Italian pizza??? I feel like that is just thrown around in the states, “real Italian pizza”. Admittedly, I wasn’t in Florence or anything crazy but WE HAD THE MOST INSANE PIZZA. Do you know how insane a pizza has to really be to still be talking about it days later?????? It was great. But by the time we were done eating it was literally almost midnight, holy Hannah.

Next day: SEVILLA

Alright alright alright alright get excited… I LOVE SEVILLA. Love it.

Sevilla is this just classy town. It feels like a classic “Spain” city.  

We got to tour the palace and the cathedral... it's the largest gothic cathedral in Spain, if I remember right. If I'm wrong, tell me. Memory don't fail me now! Haha. We got to take these ramps up 1.2 billion feet in air to see the city from the bell tower, it was sweet. But in the least racist way I can say this, seriously what the heck is with asian tourists haha? They are seriously everywhere.

It was great to be in Sevilla, because our hotel was in a useful part of the city haha! Sometimes we stay in a neighbouring town or on the outskirts of the city so we're essentially stranded. But in Sevilla we could stay out if we wanted or go back to the hotel and nap... all good options. So in our free time after our guided tour we came back to recoop and regroup a bit before visiting... well honestly i don't know the name of what we visited. The guide called it "puerta sol" and then drew a line ("puerta!") and pointed upwards ("sol!") so we'd make the connection ("es muy muy facil! puerta... sol!! entendéis?") but you can google "Sevilla mushroom" and it comes up hahaha. We wanted to walk the streets more than figure out what it was, so we kept on going after seeing it. We ended up helping buy a suit and it was hilarious. We brought it back to the hotel and WENT TO SEE A FLAMENCO SHOW. 

My thoughts on flamenco:

So there are a handful of things that are essentially at every tourist spot in Spain.

1. merchandise from said city, like those black bags with the rainbow font that say MADRIDMADRIDMADRID or SEVILLASEVILLASEVILLA or LONDONLONDONLONDON... alternatively, very poorly designed shirts that are either red with yellow decals or those tacky black and paint-splattered shirts with said city's name 

2. Fans. Hand-held fans. Doesn't matter the town. How many times have I seen someone actually use a fan?? Probably twice. 

3. Ugly magnets? Who collects fridge magnets any more?

4. Very cheaply made flamenco dresses

5. Bracelets. Everywhere. 

Flamenco dresses and other various silly things are everywhere because the flamenco is a famous dance from Spanish culture. And I was hesitant if I had any interest in even going to it because the dresses look a little strange as an extranjera, but it was SO COOL. I will without a doubt or any hesitation however say that for the safety of your ears you do not need to see more than one flamenco show in a life time. It is MUCHO CLAPPING but so fun to see. New dream... to be a sassy flamenco dancer for a day. Werk it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqxJMCQxb_Q 

Another day: La Alhambra

So in true study abroad fashion: I forgot where we were going. This was neither in Córdoba, Sevilla or Granada. So just pick a city and I will agree with you it was there. Even though it wasn't haha. La Alhambra was SUCH a fun distraction. It was this incredible garden and historical place. But the rule is if you wouldn’t post this many pictures of aa cathedral you shouldn’t post that many of a garden. So I won't. But let me tell you... garden goals. Forreal. 

I just realized I don't remember actually stopping in Granada. I might edit this later. But currently... did we go to Granada? haha..... oh shoot. 

And basically, we came home (to the hotel) to sleep before the bus ride. Because apparently we had 6 or 7 hours to conquer the next day. BooooOOoooOooooOooooooooooo.

In other news, some Halloweeny updates: Halloween in Spain is not the same. 

People do dress up and go out, but it's different. In some towns, they go trick-or-treating. In our town, they had a lot of people out dressed up in the streets for fun, but mostly hanging with friends and doing normal things + face paint and cheap costumes. Not too different from America? We went to this sweeeeet play though. It was really cool!! So the play is called Don Juan and is naturally, a famous spanish obra. In short, Don Juan is a womanizer. He claims he can make any woman fall in love with him/he could conquer any woman (that is a bit of a spanglish translation- use your context clues). And now, I will insert more wikipedia block quotes: 

Tirso de Molina wrote “El burlador de Sevilla” in 1630 in order to demonstrate a life-changing lesson. He saw that everyone was throwing his or her life away, living and sinning as they pleased, because they believed that in the end, as long as they repented before they died, they would receive the grace to enter heaven. Through his play, however, he shows that even Don Juan, who is identified as the very devil, a “man without a name” and shape-shifter, has to eventually pay for his sins. Tirso reminds us that we must pay for our actions, and that in the end death makes us all equal.

Although the various iterations of the Don Juan myth show some variation, the basic story remains the same. Starting with Tirso's work, Don Juan is portrayed as a wealthy, seductive libertine who devotes his life to seducing women, taking great pride in his ability to seduce women of all ages and stations in life.

"Tan largo me lo fiáis” is the aphorism that Don Juan lives by. It is his way of indicating that he is young and death is still distant, trusting he has plenty of time to repent for his sins.^[2] 

It was so fun to watch. But............ they found my weakness. Standing in one place for extended periods of time. Because it was an outdoor play! It was insane! There were maybe 5 or 6 different stages in an arena-type courtyard (the same place they had the fair grounds for la semana cervantina). And scene to scene would take place on a different stage. And we would have shuffle like cows in the night trying to get closer to the next stage to try and see the actors (who were still at least 200 feet away) over a million other heads in the crowd. I've never in my life been so excited to be tall. Spanish people are honestly just short. Sonia (one of our professors) stands at a whopping 5'3" and I'm 5'10" with most shoes and basically it was a great experience for me! Haha. But then I crouched down to be her height and I pretty much lost it because you can't see a single thing hahahaha oh man. Thank you American genes. 

So that was basically Halloween. I also bought myself some frozen yogurt. Praise.

Anyways... almost finals week over here! TIME TO PANIC

With love como siempre,

Jessie

Quote of the day:

Jessie: "ah shoot we're gonna be late... we're always laaate"

Alyssa: "it's fine, it's because we smell all da roses."

ALL DA ROSES

ps photos have not finished uploading to dropbox so check back tomorrow if you're SUPER CURIOUS about what the photos will be. Hint: probably about Sevilla, Córdoba, or the flamenco dance. Or me next to a garden. Idk all possible things.

                                                                                                            

On Toledo & Windmills

What's up fam!

So shout out this week to my Grandma Kay who made me laugh more than I thought possible over a greeting card. Grandma, you’re the best. She sent me a Halloween card all the way from the States and it has TEN EUROS IN IT and that was SO COOL!! Except I couldn’t help but laugh because the first line said “you’ll have to tell your Italian friends about Halloween, I’m pretty sure it’s an American holiday”. Hahahahaha. I’m just curious how one addresses an envelope to “Alcala de Henares, Spain” and then jumps to Italy haha…… I love her. Also Halloween isn’t just an American holiday. They just do it right in America.

So last week we took a short little trip to see the one and only Toledo. 

Just kidding. 

The tour guide said about 100 times there’s another Toledo in Ohio. 

I will own up right now that I have a surprisingly small amount to say about this trip. If you read about the last trip I had a hard time turning on the Spanish ears? Wasn’t really a problem today… it was more like a filtering the Spanish into “what matters” basket. I think I filtered every single thing I heard into “not a piece of information that will change my life”.

Except the bit about Ohio. Obviously very important. 

But I’ll tell you what we did anyways! 

So we drove only a few hours to see the panoramica of Toledo. It’s cool that they make these stops for us. Moments like this makes me think my life is a postcard. I know I say that about Utah too, but it was really beautiful. But I think I left my heart in Barcelona, because every other town is great but… Barcelona was the best. 

We walked the streets of Toledo touring different important bits and holy freaking heck. When they say Toledo is known for swords… I was going to take a picture of all the different sword shops, but after taking one picture and then looking down the street I decided that was a dumb idea. Madrid is to shoe shops as Toledo is to sword shops. It was crazy because I went with our group from store to store to store to store to store and I had this moment of understanding where it finally made sense to me why men hate shopping with women for silly things that they don’t need. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH A SWORD, they weren’t even sharp! Why would you buy a sword that has less risk than a butter knife? These were letter openers. VERY EXPENSIVE LETTER OPENERS. 

Toledo was actually really cool and had parts that reminded me of my hometown. Actually, that’s probably more the weather than the town itself, but anyhow. My favorite thing we saw was probably the museum dedicated to El Greco, a famous painter from Spain. This is kind of dorky, but I love seeing the artistic liberties different museums take to create an experience. Back home the art museum by the lakeside is beautiful (google: Milwaukee Calatrava) but also limited to things it can display inside since it’s so stinking cold. Also that it could snow up to your knees in an afternoon. Anywho, the weather in Spain is a little more flexible. It does get cold, but my host fam says they get snow in Madrid maybe once a year. So half the experience of visiting this museum is walking in and out of these buildings/home from the time period that have been preserved… it’s neat. Also one of our professors always makes fun of me for drawing mascaras feas in class, but there were some hilarious statues that I also loved that I’ll attach a picture if I remember. 

After walking around the town with our guide, they took us out to the country side to race go carts!!!!!!! SPANISH CARRRRTS!!!

Just kidding. We went to see the cathedral hahahahahaha.

The cathedral had two very cool features that I hadn’t seen before. One of them was this crazy, ah……… I want to call it an art installation, but that’s not the name of it. I want to say statues, but that doesn’t feel like enough. I don’t know, it was sweet. These statues were a few hundred feet in the air right in front of this stained window-my dinky camera phone does not really do it justice. Mirad:

The other one was this painting in one of the rooms that was the entire ceiling. This is not so much a thing I’ve never seen before in Spain, it was just really really good. We talked in class about it- that the painting is supposed to continue the architecture upwards as an optical illusion and look like heaven is directly above you. It’s well done, but the illusion I didn’t think was all that crazy. But I was impressed at the accuracy of the perspective and proportion abilities of the painting…. Can you imagine being literally bent-over backwards to paint some random cathedral ceiling as if you were looking directly at someone’s butt 300 feet above you? Jeez oh man… these are some of the thoughts I have in cathedrals. #bigdeepcollegethoughts

Anyhow, so that was Toledo. Oh AND we went to see the REAL DEAL painting by El Greco!! Yes, the one Señor P spent a whole class period lecturing about in Spanish 4 back at GHS. The one I thought I would spend the rest of my life having only known from a textbook. ITS GIGANTIC. And I couldn’t take pictures where it was displayed, so I want you to imagine a wall. Stack another wall on top of it. If you can see the top of the wall without cranking your neck all the way back, add another wall. That’s the size of the painting. We had free time afterwards where some friends went and payed 10 euros to do a zipline in Toledo (“the longest zipline in Europe”- I’m still a little skeptical) but I wasn’t feeling too well so I was kind of ready to book it out of Toledo. 

After having to suffer through a handful of skinny skinny Spain backroads, the bus took us out to the countryside. And then suddenly we were in the middle of nowhere to see los molinos de viente… windmills!! That was such a fun day. That was honestly the highlight for me. I KNOW THEY’RE JUST WINDMILLS but they made me really happy. I think we were going to tour them with a guide, but for some reason it was closed so we just got to goof around for an hour and take some pictures, it was great.  That was probably why it was the highlight of my day since nothing really cool happened. I mean I was trying to get the supa professional angle for a photo by kneeling on the ground and I kneeled literally directly into these huge thorns, but that isn’t interesting haha. Also it drew blood. I was shocked. MAN DOWN.

Oop.. shoot. Almost completely forgot. In between Toledo and the windmills we visited a different town… except in the nicest way I can say it, it was literally the most boring town I’ve ever seen. A tumbleweed could have blown down the street and it would have been thrilling. Haha. 

The reason I mention it at all is because they’re a part of the history of spain. Obv. As I’ve talked about super briefly, Spain is known for Don Quijote written by Cervantes. And every single city seems to feel like they have a claim to it haha, because literally literally every single city has merchandice of Don Quijote on his horse with Sancho walking next to him (google it). The other symbolism you’ll find everywhere are windmills. Don Quijote supposedly hiked through this part of Spain and attacked the windmills as he thought they were monsters/enemies? It's hard to summarize two huge books haha. 

And the little rinky dinky town was a part of the camino del quijote.

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (Spanish: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha), is a Spanish novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Published in two volumes, in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote is considered one of the most influential works of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature and one of the earliest canonical novels, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published, such as the Bokklubben World Library collection that cites Don Quixoteas authors' choice for the "best literary work ever written".^[2] It follows the adventures of a nameless hidalgo who reads so many chivalric romances that he loses his sanity and decides to set out to revive chivalry, undo wrongs, and bring justice to the world, under the name Don Quixote.

He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire, who often employs a unique, earthy wit in dealing with Don Quixote's rhetorical orations on antiquated knighthood. Don Quixote, in the first part of the book, does not see the world for what it is and prefers to imagine that he is living out a knightly story. Throughout the novel, Cervantes uses such literary techniques as realism, metatheatre, and intertextuality. It had a major influence on the literary community, as evidenced by direct references in Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers (1844), Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), as well as the word "quixotic". Arthur Schopenhauer cited Don Quixote as one of the four greatest novels ever written, along with Tristram Shandy, La Nouvelle Héloïse and Wilhelm Meister.^[3]

Exciting block quote courtesy of Wikipedia. My homie for life.

So that's that. 

Love you all!

Keep the faith.

Splurge on on toilet paper, 

shampoo,

and chocolate.

Always chocolate.

un abrazo-

Jessie