El viaje//The journey: Oooops...

Hi team,

So let's just skip over the part where I apologize profusely for being such a bad blogger, make some excuses about all the things I've been doing recently, and promise to do better in the future. Firstly because (surprise!) I looked at a calendar today, and not only has it been a month since I last published a post, but there's really only about a month left in my program, with approximately three weeks of that being dedicated to spring break, since Easter is practically in May this year. This past month, something exciting has happened every single weekend, so my strategy for this post is to catch you up on that, and leave out the weeks of class in between, because nothing terribly fascinating has happened there. Looking forward, my parents and sister arrive in Spain exactly one week from today (!!!!!!!!!) and we'll take off to do ten days or so of touristy stuff around Spain (Alicante, Barcelona, Madrid). So right now let's catch up, and then I'll be sure to post over break in more detail (she says, wondering, as always, if that will actually happen).

Weekend 1: Friday, March 18, Valencia/Las Fallas

Background: Valencia is the nearest big city - about an hour-long bus drive away, it's the third largest city in Spain. And the population of said third-largest city triples during Las Fallas, a week-long festival that culminates in the burning of giant brightly-colored statues that have been decorating streets all over the city.

Millions of people filled the streets and gathered in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento for la Máscleta, an impressive firecracker show that takes place every day of Las Fallas at 2pm. In the middle of the afternoon, obviously, there are no pretty lights that accompany the noise, it's really just SOUND. The feeling is incredibly difficult to describe, but you can hear the booming, pounding and cracking in every part of your body. It affects your heartrate, echos in your head, and shakes the thousands and thousands of bodies in the city with every explosion. There's an art and a rhythm to it - each day, a different team of engineers and technicians sets up their own unique show. This is what the explosion area looks like afterwards:

It was only a day trip, and while some people returned on Saturday, the final day of Las Fallas, to see the bonfires and the huge fireworks show, I didn't, dreading more time spent in enormous crowds, and having plans to go to the campo//countryside with my host family. (Which I did, and it was wonderful! My Spanish aunt and uncle have a house in the "mountains" outside of Alicante - barely a twenty-minute drive, but a completely different landscape! We picked oranges and lemons to take home, met their dog; my sister and cousin made a fort out of olive tree branches... we ate all afternoon long, only pausing for a stroll around the fields/mountain next to their land. A family football game followed, and after the boys had again been fed while everyone else groaned and held their stomachs in horror at the thought of eating more, we went home, exhausted.)

Weekend 2: Friday, March 25, Murcia

At the last minute, I signed up to take another Friday day trip to Murcia, a city slightly larger than Alicante about an hour in the opposite direction from Valencia. The sign-up sheet had only appeared the previous week, so most of the program people had already planned trips or Friday activities. As a result, there were only 13 of us on the bus Friday morning, which made for a perfectly-sized trip. It was a nice break from going on excursions with the unwieldy CIEE group of 100+ people. It's wonderful to not feel so conspicuous.

David, the professor of art at CIEE, is a Murcia native and used to work for the tourism office, so he was our guide through the Cathedral, the Casino (not the Vegas kind, but more of an aristocratic social club) ... complete with ballroom:

...and the Museo Salzillo (dedicated to the murciano artist of that name). It was a pleasant day of wandering the city, listening to David talk (which he does love to do) and eating a fantastic comida in a restaurante in Plaza de Flores which, true to the name, was indeed full of flowers.

Some photos:

David demonstrates the process of touching up one's makeup in the ladies powder room of the Casino

On a more serious note: the name of dictator's son and fascist party leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera is carved into one of the outer walls of the Cathedral, a reminder of the dictatorship

Aaand: lunch...

Yum.

And here, in the middle of the river, there's a less tasty fish.

Weekend 3: Friday-Saturday, April 1-2, Granada

Granada is beautiful. Quick history review: it was the capital of Moorish Spain, and was the last city to be re-assimilated by Isabella and Fernando, the Catholic Kings, in 1492. As a result, it retains a strong Arabic influence in art, architecture, tea, and other cultural elements. In a related phenomenon, there are a LOT more hippies there. Tea, hookahs...

We saw the royal chapel, complete with the tombs of Fernando and Isabella, as well as their daughter Juana the Mad and her husband Felipe the Beautiful (Handsome? How do we refer to him in English? I don't actually know). You can climb down some very narrow stairs and actually peek through a window at their coffins. Cool. The resting figures of them above also lend to one of my favorite anecdotes of the trip: Isabella's head rests lower on its cushion than Fernando's, not because she was a woman and therefore inferior (as could have been safely assumed in almost any other situation), but because she was considered to be smarter than her husband, and the sculptor therefore decided that her head must have weighed more than his, and so he situated it lower.

That night we went to a flamenco performance in a cave. No, really. There are groups of people (mostly ethnic gypsies) who put on flamenco shows for tourists in caves in the side of a hill in the old part of the city. The lighting was terrible, so my photos are all awful, but this will give you an idea:

The next day we did the tour of the Alhambra, which is huge - it was a walled city, after all - and clearly divided into two distinct styles: pre-1492, and post-1492. In one of the building, the change was as quick as walking through a door to pass from this:

to this:

Do you see the difference? our tour guide asked us, grinning. Now tell me, which one do you like better?

After the Alhambra, some of us opted to take a walk through the old neighborhood of white houses that sits down below the walls. We strolled through narrow streets:

stopped in a plaza for the view, hippie vendors, and some flamenco:

and I took an artsy photo:

We had tapas and a second (third?) gelato of the trip for lunch before climbing back on the bus for the five and some- hour drive home. Pretty much everybody slept.