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
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